Category Archives: Arts

When the Aurora theater shooting was perpetrated there was a whole series of issues in the way the event was handled that I found very upsetting. I wrote some things about police handling of the investigation that were among the angriest and most offensively worded things that I have ever written. It was a desperate attempt to attract more attention to reforming police procedure, reporting on mass shootings, reporting between agencies and public police relations. Of course I got no response from any of the parties I tried to offend — not the police, the mainstream media or the sort of half-breed institutions that act as part media and part police. No response except some evidence that some isolated elements in both media and police took offense and put me on their enemies list. Fair enough, I have earned lots of enemies but although I hate reading those words I still think that if I was not so universally ignored it might have prevented some of the horrors of police – public connections and relations that have plagued us ever since. Yes that is egotistical, but if you read this blog regularly you already know that I am fairly egotistical. Insulting the most capable group in society of inflicting harm was not a choice I made lightly even in the heat of anger.

O. J. Simpson’s legal team demonized the police so he could get away with murdering his wife and her associate or lover — his tactic succeeded despite the lack of any relevance to anything. I suggested that the police needed to disprove that a man dressed entirely like a cop, in a place cops were known to work and who shot with skill was not in fact a cop. I suggested that this lack of confronting that issue was inexcusable. I did it in ways that were over the top. But my goal was to start a discussion — I failed to achieve my objective where Simpson’s attorneys did achieve theirs. I never said a cop did it and I laid out the facts that Holmes probably did it and said so clearly to those few who can actually follow an argument they do not like. But I achieved no discussion whatsoever of how to handle situations when a cop may have run amok. That was around this time of year in 2012. All of the corrosive events since then may make many people (whose point of view I can’t respect) feel that such criticism contributed to the bad will sense. They are basically fools and self-deluded cowards but many of them hate people like me on sight so this won’t gain me new enemies really — they sense that I dislike the status quo they don’t wan’t criticized as soon as they see me. Still I would apologize for how angry those words were if I thought it meant anything.
When the Lafayette theater shooting occurred in 2015 and the killer was not dressed like a cop in the view of hundreds of witnesses and the reporting was in my mind sane I said nothing negative about the cops or the cop reportage media industry. I focused on the victims and shared reported links about them such as this and this which emphasized their great human beauty as people. I also shared other links like this. Until this sentence I have never mentioned that Train Wreck is a disturbing movie which many people would find offensive and hard to watch in any of my other treatments of this topic. That is true although as I wrote with empathy in the Charlie Ebdo massacre I never took up the Je Suis Charlie Ebdo tag. I actually think Amy Schumer has some serious things to say in the film and they need to be said. I am not at all sure she says them in a way that deserves major feature film distribution acroos America. But until now I did not mention that and I did focus some attention on the killer and his horrible points of view which led to this crisis. A post or two on that shooting made this blog. So my criticism harsh as it was had a very specific context. Positive posts about police have appeared here , here and here. But that first post which I do not link but which is still here on this blog and elsewhere will haunt me for the rest of my life with a long and more complete line of ghosts than most people have.

The sign that is a feature of the city announcing showtimes is dark

CNN was one of many news organizations around for the longer stretch

Local media has been all over this story.

Grand Theater Shooting police presence days later

So two lovely women who are part of the Acadiana community which I have loved and lived in were killed at a movie about women’s issues that were offensively portrayed by a man whose whole life was devoted to offensive behaviors and thoughts. the cops and media handled it well and that scarcely lessens the tragedy. That is not the kind of writing I would like to do about women, movies are cops but it beats the Aurora piece. I have blogged about the Louisiana Story and the Blob which have been big parts of my life. I have also blogged about other movies such as here for LA LA Land,here for a local film and here for the classic Belizaire the Cajun and here for other films. Films are a major interest of mine.

In my brother’s recent foray into feature films I had a chance to shoot the pictures below of an attractive young woman, Dasha Nekrasova a Belarus native who grew up in Las Vegas and lives in Los Angeles and is making a movie in Louisiana. It reminds me of a time when I was able to think of cops, women and movies all in a different and more hopeful way than I can now. It reminds me of a time when my past life was less complex. That being said I was never the kind of person cops look like and say “he is a good citizen and we want to be on his side” with any kind of universality. I have a certain instinct for trouble, am usually unhappy and they usually sense both things pretty quickly.
I have never really known what it is like to move forward in life without feeling that terrible tension between what was going on and what is tolerable in the world but I am trying to understand things better. All the good things in life get more distant to me as I age even when they are present. But I did feel connected to something better seeing this girl/woman telling an American story.

The story of Hollywood is a great story and fusion of stories. There are many versions of at least parts of that story. Most people don’t have huge amount of time to devote to the telling or hearing of the tales of that great American industry. LA LA Land is a Damien Chazelle film which attempts to give us a look behind the veil that covers the lives lived in the capital of American entertainment. Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood does somehow have tonalities of the painterly French Vision of the Artist and I am French and American enough to feel that he has some elements in his visual language that come from the confluence of those cultures. his sense of music, muse, absorption in art and the nature of genius as displayed in Whiplash have brightened somewhat here. But, while knowing Damien Chazelle a bit helps us to see the vision on the bigger screen than usual — there are other things the film requires us to know better and more urgently. In this post I focus on Hollywood, love, movies, Los Angeles and the real cost of making choices as the major thing to understand while watching this film.

My parents and I were out celebrating on January 30,2017 and saw the film. It moved me to see what the story attempted and its ambitious ending was a part of the scope of the film exhibited in the greater vision of Cinemascope. From the acting to the choreography and the writing, I thought this movie was an exciting example of both great innovation and great preservation of important traditions in movie-making. The Washington Post review of what’s up with this year’s Oscars had to focus on this film because of its many nominations. But there was a follow-up story about the backlash to so much love coming to this new musical from the Academy. I think that the thing that distinguishes the film most is a sequence which comes near the end and reminds me of two other films. It reminds me of the opening sequence of the fine animated film UP! which makes that movie and it reminds me of the early montage sequence cut from The Big Chill in which Kevin Costner plays the deceased character Alex. The sequence changes all else there is and I relate to it profoundly — it adds the blues to the Jazz that defines much of the film and it pushes American audiences to understand the tensions that really exist in love, responsibility, happiness, communication and the needs of kids as well as the urgency of earning a living. In the scene around the sequence the central characters are in a real sense mysterious strangers where an observer would be challenged to detect the mystery but would readily know that they were strangers.

Movie-Made Americais a book which attempts to tell part of that story which is the story of all Hollywood as it relates to all America. I had the book assigned to me back in the 1990s in a class on the history of popular culture at Louisiana State University and I read it again later on. This film is also really quite a thoughtful story about the relationship between Hollywood and Los Angeles as the dream capital and the rest of the country. The intrinsic challenge which is part of this film is that of telling that historical and social tale which defines the film industry while telling this very specific love story. That larger social challenge is certainly not fully met in the film but the full story of Hollywood is quite a story to tell.

There is not much one can say about the stuff dreams are made of that falls into the realm of journalism and perhaps less that falls into the realm of hard sciences. But movies are dreams and Jazz music is a language of dreams as well and actresses and pianists long to interpret the substance of other people’s dreams. The distance between Emma Stone and Mia is not an easy distance to determine. They both come from other states in the West to seek the fulfillment of screen dreams in Hollywood. Presumably Ryan Gosling is less like Sebastian. But the movie speaks to far more than that. It speaks to All American dreaming of greatness and the struggles they face and personal costs that can never be calculated. Like a friend of mine who is a black rocket scientist dreamer in a largely white world it speaks through the white Jazz man in L.A. about greatness that is off the racial and regional beat. This movie allows anyone, especially Americans, to seriously remember and evaluate where their own dreams have taken them.

In La La Land, a film that is the most movie oriented filmI can remember in quite a while, one of the major characters is not directly tied to the movies. We can remember seeing Julianne Hough, Tom Cruise, Alec Baldwin and Katherine Zeta Jones remind us of the massive meaning of the music scene in L.A. in Rock of Ages not too long ago. But many of us forget that Los Angeles is a real town where music and movies have a complicated industrial relationship but real human being in both worlds have very human relationships. Jazz pianist Sebastian as played by Ryan Gosling reminds us of the way that entertainment lives in L.A. and that many of the performing arts are located as largely there at any industrial level and worldwide magnitude as they are in any other city. The purist with a small club is part of the total picture of L.A. life — there two we remember Rock of Ages. Albums from small producers and independent labels may still very likely hail from L.A. in one sense or another. The people who are in that world are people as complicated and authentically human Mia Dolan and Sebastian. My father left the film saying it reminded him of West Side Story, a very New York musical. But perhaps that is what they each had in common — they each spoke of a great American coastal city in a very specific time. The recent election reminds us of what the Oceanic coasts have in common. The Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes are not inland either but they are a separate vibe altogether.

Some reviews of the movie have been kinder than others but most can see the appeal of the couple Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) and Mia (Emma Stone) who are young nice to look at and are drawn together by their common location and a respect each has for the others desire to do what they love as they try to do that as well. Success is hard to define but the path to mounting successes presents them with choices and with each set of decisions the fragile fabric of their love affair is strained and then tattered, and the dreams they worked so hard to maintain in each other threaten to rip them apart. The Wall Street Journal review is I think more on point than most. But, although I deeply respect the film, I am not ready to give up on the super happy endings. I would love to have one myself. But this is a very human film about what people can believe might happen who are in the habit of looking both at greatness and personal cost in their lives. Our political class could learn something from it too –but it might be a bit to subtle for many of them. That is an uncharitable remark, the film is not uncharitable.

My parents as a young couple

Summers family dining at the cloisters at Sea Island

Loraina and Sally (W.G-r. & L.T-t) my student assistants at a tecnical university in China

There is a good bit of questioning about antisemitism in America and about the Jewish identity and experience in America if one is attuned to such discussions. The totality of the discussion would include a variety of relatively disinterested observers, Jews and also thoroughgoing antisemites. However, this post is not primarily a post on antisemitism. Like a lot of posts on this blog it sort of meanders along –but it meanders more into being a discussion of Jews in America than being a discussion of antisemitism. However, for those interested in a more thorough discussion of antisemitism in America in recent years this article on the Huffington Post is a place to start. But while there are no simple answers to the question, it is possible in a meandering way to ask “who are American Jews?” With all respect to Wrangler and Lee, it has always seemed to me that the most American garment is a great pair of blue jeans and the most American of the great blue jeans is also Jewish. The Levi Strauss company founded by a German Jewish family before Germany became known for the Holocaust and when Mendelssohn’s wedding march filled both synagogues and Christian churches and was likely to be what one thought of in terms of the relationship of Jewishness and German identity. But this article is not mostly about Mendelssohn but mostly about another music maker — Billy Joel. (Still alive and more than welcome to comment on my little blog).

I like Billy Joel music and songs — in fact Piano Man is probably my favorite Billy Joel song, although this post is much more about Keeping the Faith. But in this post I want to discuss a particular aspect of my appreciation of his music. That aspect is how his music added, and still adds a certain something to American life and culture. Something which is Jewish, which is American and which is more profound than it seems.

The story of American life and the story of American Judaism is a complicated pair of stories that relate very definitely to one another. Some names that come to mind when thinking of the Jewish qualities and tones that are part of American life and the American qualities and tones that are part of some Jewish life are Billy Joel, Eli Wiesel, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Gloria Steinem, Adam Sandler, Gilda Radner, Billy Chrystal and Yasmine Bleeth among others. But in the matrilineal tradition of many parts of modern Judaism and Hebraica neither Bleeth nor Steinem or necessarily Jewish –only their fathers really are for sure. Some people like Jean Chatzky are not so open about it in all aspects of their life but they are still willing to reveal their Jewish identity in the right format. The connection of all Jewish life to the events of the Holocaust is a real and vital set of connections. That doesn’t mean that the terms “Hitler” and “Nazi” have not often enough been bastardized to mean whatever anyone might want them to mean. Nonetheless, the Third Reich was real enough. The nation of Israel has shown Jews fighting for their own people and doing so effectively. There were few such successes in direct Jewish resistance to the Third Reich. But a Jew from Germany ‘s First Reich (named J. Robert Oppenheimer) with the support of a Jew who refused to return to the Germany during the Third Reich (named Albert Einstein) designed and developed the atomic weapons that would have defeated the Third Reich if we had not already beaten them a bit earlier. These same Jewish based technologies secured America’s place in the post-war world. As much as these varied people have contributed to American life and greatness I still am drawn to think about Billy Joel.

I am where I am in my own journey through life. There is not much I have to write that does not matter in some significant way to me but I am aware of the limits of its import to the larger world. But as I begin this post I have a particular song on my mind — Keeping the Faith, by Billy Joel. The video features his real life wife playing a character in the song. Christie Brinkley is the only woman to bear him a child that I or the general public know about for sure — Alexa Ray. Although he would be married several other time and Christie Brinkley would have other children not with him and most romantic of all, she and Joel didn’t make it all the way to the grave together they were a couple who made an impression. I have spent a good bit of time in the last few months talking about my own past, in some ways I find something to relate to in Billy Joel’s song. But it is hard to know how well America relates to this nostalgia for an American youth.

Billy Joel is a man who in real life has known something about the love affairs and American living that he heard about first and later wrote intelligently about in the songs of American popular music. The story is that of a man with his fair share of woes to say the least but also the story of a great American pop artist. The lyrics of “Keeping the Faith” tell some of his story.

“Keeping The Faith”

If it seems like I’ve been lost
In let’s remember
If you think I’m feeling older
And missing my younger days
Oh, then you should have known me much better
‘Cause my past is something that never
Got in my way
Oh no

The truth is that when one looks back on the past and sees only the glory days or only the sorrows one does not really look back on the past. But we have a hard time not looking back on the past with all the many colors of nostalgia at one time or another. Billy Joel has allegedly attempted suicide a number of times and had struggles with alcohol abuse. What I am sure of is that he wrote and performed songs which people have related to fairly intensely over the years. Judaism contributed to the founding of Islam and Christianity each more than any other single source in objective historical terms — and therefore it is older. Nostalgia has a particular place in Jewish identity in the West.

Still I would not be here now
If I never had the hunger
And I’m not ashamed to say
The wild boys were my friends
Oh
‘Cause I never felt the desire
‘Til their music set me on fire
And then I was saved, yeah
That’s why I’m keeping the faith
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Keeping the faith

There was a whole lot more going on in the urban neighborhood of Joel’s song besides just music and faith. One thing he seems to believe in as he tells the story in song is the junction of youth, community and the commerce based on local shared consumption. One can imagine a largely or susbstantially Jewish neighborhood in a great American city in the song. the song is sometimes shocking but a Catholic who is honest about Mardi Gras or Carnival as a Catholic liturgical season that is not a liturgical season should have no trouble making room for some kind of insight.

We wore old matador boots
Only Flagg Brothers had them with a Cuban heel
Iridescent socks with the same color shirt
And a tight pair of chinos
Oh
I put on my shark skin jacket
You know the kind with the velvet collar
And ditty-bop shades
Oh yeah
I took a fresh pack of Luckies
And a mint called Sen-Sen
My old man’s Trojans
And his Old Spice after shave
Oh
Combed my hair in a pompadour
Like the rest of the Romeos wore
A permanent wave, Yeah
We were keeping the faith

The boys with the condoms and and the knowledge of which local merchants had the right clothes who smoked and got their hair done were making the boundaries of their community real enough. One wonders about the connections between the Catholic situation in America and the Jewish one at various times and in various places. the Jewish belief in the rituals that consecrate sex, life, the seasons of the year and the sense of being a people are modified in different ways as they come into Christianity. The secular Jewish experience is another modified view of those ancient streams.

Catholics have different reactions to the Trump administration singling out Mexico for his principal target of isolation. Isolation can be targeted. So the reactions over time will be interesting…. the targeting of Sanctuary cities may well be a cause of conflict with Catholics in many cases. But the Catholic identity is that of Mike Pence, VP as well as of the undocumented worker. In addition Mexico and Central America are much less Roman Catholic than they used to be — much less. One wonders about the kind of Catholicism that Donald John Trump expects to confront. In the paper below from the American bishops, the right of the country to protect itself is balanced with the rights of those who might suffer. But there is a cultural sympathy that is not to be missed. One sees in trump a man who is very much an American secular Protestant who surrounds himself in close relationships with Catholics and Jews as well as others. I still have not pegged Trump at the personal level, his real policy goals I feel I understand well enough to discuss them but the man — not so much. Pence seems a likeable Catholic and his job is important and official. Mnuchin seems an unusually unlikeable American Jew and may not get confirmed. While Ivanka and Jared seem to be trotted around a great deal neither seems to have an official position. If not all Catholics will trust Trump is devoid of Anti-Catholic bias one wonders what varied Jews might be thinking.

I am told that the President of Mexico has cancelled a meeting with President Trump. I like Trump being strong and energetic and I favor a vigorous and strong America. I also favor a healthy Mexico. I am a Catholic and an American. I look at the people who are trying to see where Trump plays out with Jews and there seems to be a hint that some people are wondering if only Israel is the Jewish place to be. Some see this perhaps in Trump’s chief strategist. I myself am on the far right (in my own opinion). I am able to oppose too much driving of Christianity from the Public square. But I also see a value in secular space and zones of governance. I also appreciate the Jewish American experience I even think there are things all of us can learn from their journey — even my WASP friends.

Getting back to Billy Joel, I too can remember that my own ethnic and specific heritage as a particular kind of American was not perfect either. You (or one) can see a criticism of both a blind progressivism and a cultural conservatism that is unquestioning for any American in his next few lines. Take them as autobiography, politics, romantic memoir or any number of other forms and one can find some truth in them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Keeping the faith
You can get just so much
From a good thing
You can linger too long
In your dreams
Say goodbye to the
Oldies but goodies
‘Cause the good ole days weren’t
Always good
And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems

But Billy Joel and I do indeed have different pasts and he is quite a bit older than me. Getting a bit off text again we witnessed different parts of the fire he sang about. We had different parts of the song going through our heads. But only the differences of versions and arrangements of the greater metaphorical song — I relate to his song We Didn’t Start the Fire , just fine. But like a lot his songs it is not of a single simple meaning. For now, let’s get through the song for which this post is named.

Learned stickball as a formal education
Lost a lot of fights
But it taught me how to lose O.K.
Oh, I heard about sex
But not enough
I found you could dance
And still look tough anyway
Oh yes I did
I found out a man ain’t just being macho
Ate an awful lot of late night drive-in food
Drank a lot of take home pay
I thought I was the Duke of Earl
When I made it with a red-haired girl
In the Chevrolet. Oh yeah
We were keeping the faith
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Keeping the faith

A while back on Facebook I received a compliment from a red-haired beauty from my own ethnic community in Acadiana and reminded her of a long ago date in Chevy Impala and was gratified by a smoochy emoji in response. While Billy Joel’s lyrical boasts do not apply to the date she and I were commemorating online much is similar, thus remembered by me or in song it is a deeply American experience. So I look at the role of Jews as a religious minority and I contrast them to the Jihadi Muslim communities. The other Muslims may or may not listen to Billy Joel but the smartest among them realize that American Jews have worked hard to create a workable secular American culture because it is one that they can participate in. It is sometimes good and sometimes bad but I respect the effort. Muslims, Christians and Jews can all wear Levis, listen at least to Piano Man if not this post’s theme song and enjoy some discrimination-free public space. I have a Jewish friend, a woman whose initials are JY and like some of the great American Jews she has done humanitarian and secular and patriotic things. She is spiritually adventurous and like so many she is vastly more liberal and more leftist than I am (two separate measures) but I think she has come to respect me and my views a little. I have mentioned her here but will not go further than this in this particular post. The relationships between Acadians and Jews are very complex and very enduring. there is plenty that is of Hebrew origin in the mix of French, Greek, Latin, Spanish and MiqMaq ingredients an Anglo scholar can find in the Cajun culture. I have reminded miss JY of her heritage more often than not — although I do not know really how closely she relates to it. But whatever her struggle is with majority culture it does not involved blowing up people in their homes and at markets. Europe’s murdered millions of Jews filled a niche that others from the same region of the world now fill- a good number of those people are committed to destroying the Europe both Goethe and Mendelssohn built together. Where Hitler complained of the occasional Jewish Caftan there is now the burka.

You know the good ole days weren’t always good
And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems

I told you my reasons
For the whole revival
Now I’m going outside to have
An ice cold beer in the shade
Oh, I’m going to listen to my 45’s
Ain’t it wonderful to be alive
When the rock ‘n’ roll plays, yeah
When the memory stays, yeah
I’m keeping the faith
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Keeping the faith
I’m keeping the faith,
Yes I am

So what about America and Billy Joel? What about the world of Christie Brinkley and Billy Joel? I am not sure that America will be great again or OK or anything else. But I will be here fighting my corner until I can’t anymore. I am glad there are friends of Israel in the new administration. But along with some York, some Cornwall, some Languedoc, some Extremadura and some Shetlands — besides some Sicily and some Chihuahua — I like a little Galilee, Judea and Israel in my America as well.

The Giant Omelette Celebration in Abbeville has passed. The website can be linked here. It is a memorable event every year. I enjoyed it — despite the fact that I was not in a position to be enjoying much of anything just now — I decided to let myself go and rejoice in the event.

I saw a lot of people that I knew and spoke to some of them. Tomorrow The Hillary-Kane ticket and the Trump-Pence ticket will go at one another and other will be on the final ballots as well. The country will face many other electoral decisions. But yesterday and the day before was a celebration of other structures in America which are not directly tied to this election. The town,culture and celebration are not perfect. But they are worth experiencing and are worthy.

I participated as much as I could, more time than I could afford and although I spent very little I may not have been able to afford that either. But this was a glimpse of life that transcends and underlies all the political tensions in America.

So I hope to be in a position to comment on the outcome of the election. I hope to be able to have some success to be able in turn to solve my myriad problems. But I am also a person who enjoyed the Omelette Celebration, watched the Saints win in San Francisco and spent some time at church and with family. That’s life too…

Emerging Views: The Reemergence of American Identity in Postwar Acadiana and the SONJ Documentary Projects

Prologue:

This blog version may have little effect other than preventing me from getting the paper published elsewhere — or it may happen that I do get it published else where. That would be a more perfect and less conversational version than this one in almost any acadmeic review or journal. This blog however is by its nature an unfinished place a set of windows looking into the office I do not really have most of the time. I will probably edit it from time to time but less than I should. But even if a truly academic version of this paper is ever published it is not motivated by the factors that motivate younger scholars with higher hopes to do work which will secure their position in the historical profession. This is not a paper so much about great events or trends which directly shaped the entire South but about how important events in a particular part of the South may be relevant to Southern and American History as well as being otherwise relevant. One event within the whole Standard Oil of New Jersey experience with employing Documentary image makers is especially crucial to understanding this subject that event is the playing of the film Louisiana Story in Abbeville. That’s in part because of editing and production that occurred there not very far from the Dixie theater. The remainder of the experience of the interaction between the documentarians and the Cajuns and others of the Acadiana region has some climax in that great premiere to which we will return later in this discussion.[1]

In my oral presentation at the Gulf South History and Humanities Conference I got pretty aggressive about presentation of the main points in the twenty minutes I had allotted to me. I will keep that vigorously stark numerical introduction here.. I wish to cover six essential points; these listed points make up the entire argument of this paper.

1. The Cajuns were, as the Acadian people, a preexisting people with a history in Louisiana before the Louisiana Purchase. They also had a relationship with New England which predates the founding of the Republic of the United States of America. Their greatest injury was largely planned in New England and their greatest poetic portrayal was written there after the founding of our republic.

2. Through the American Revolution, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812 and a variety of events related to the Civil War they acquired a strong identity as Americans in the 1840’s and on into the 1860’s. This is the period of emergence of American identity among the Acadian people as they were also becoming the Cajun people in some ways and remaining the Acadian people in other ways. The specific Louisiana term was part of their Americanization process. 3.They lost that identity almost entirely except in public, legal and formal ways by 1875. This happened through through a variety of significant causes to a significant degree. This is what I call a process of alienation. 4.The World War Two period helped them to recover their American identity. 5. The SONJ projects capture that reemerging identity and demonstrate the leadership of Oil in forming a new American identity in which they will participate. 6.Louisiana Story and the SONJ projects brought Americans together in that new identity. This is an identity that was in particular flux during the postwar period.

This list of points just given is chronological. It is not the order in which I discuss them from now on. Starting with the third point — that there is in Cajun history a period of alienation. Reemergence comes out of alienation and a quick survey is essential. When studying the restoration of a particular identity in the Second World War we are discussing arriving at what had been achieved only after the French and Indian Wars before the USA, the American Revolution and the War of 1812 with the USA. This complex American journey defined a specific Cajun identity different from the one that reemerged but not utterly distinct from it. That identity of the mid-nineteenth century like the one of mid-twentieth century and the years since was both a special ethnic identity with a connection to a gneral American Identity and a separate emphasis within the American Identity as Cajuns conceived their society’s total self perception and alongside the American identity in their own minds as Cajuns. The Acadians were going to become and did become in the period from 1875 to 1940 alienated from an identity evident from the 1840s to 1860s when Louisiana had a Cajun governor and other dignitaries. A Cajun led the Louisiana Secession Committee before the Civil War. Longfellow and Andrew Jackson had in very different ways had incorporated their story into the fabric of the American story and made in them a sense of union incarnate. Those themes of unionism and secessionism are both real facts which seem contradictory. The contradictions had their effects and in the late 1850s they fought bloody battles among themselves to determine the kind of American vision they would support. In that period they had a fully developed American identity. America was different in ways that mattered to Cajuns — first Louisiana Constitution was written in French and English and in the 1840s there were laws passed assuring public schools with English Only, French Only and bilingual education would exist. But in the defeat of the South in the Civil War and the death in battle of Acadian General Alexander Mouton leading the decisive charge in the last major Confederate Victory the old Acadian- American synthesis had stumbled not to rise again. Later the spiral of doom continued and the prohibition of French in schools in the 1920s, even the publication of Parkman’s History of France and England in North America were, taken together very alienating factors for the Acadians . The termAmerican came to identify people who were not Acadian or Cajun within the Cajun community. However today Cajuns generally feel American.

Try to recall all six of those points first mentioned. The paper has a reach from at least 1604 to the 1990s but it also has a focus even more narrow than the 1943 to 1953 period that defines the SONJ Documentaries. Despite the huge battles and losses of life yet to come in the war, the start of a postwar vision of America may well have begun in 1943. People began to imagine a world after the war and people like Roy Stryker and the executives at Standard Oil began to act on that imagined future. In this paper I really focus on the last three points of my list. They can be summarized as: Fourth, In World War Two Cajuns recovered American identity, fifth Standard Oil of New Jersey showed oil industry leadership in forming a new American identity which included various distinct communities and sixth, Louisiana Story and the Stryker photographers like Webb and Eagle all helped form new American identity in postwar Acadiana.

A final somewhat repetitive introductory remark is that the film Louisiana Story in Abbeville is the heart of this paper and the rest of the projects are related to that.

Louisiana Story is a film by Robert Flaherty which was commissioned by Standard Oil of New Jersey in conjunction with an enormous photographic project overseen by Roy Stryker. Both Stryker and Flaherty had established fame in the documentary work of the New Deal. Flaherty was in addition considered to be the Father of Documentary Film — with a body of work going back to the era of silent film.

There were two articles on the front page of the local paper –the Abbeville Meridional in that issue which was devoted in significant part to the movie premiere. This amount of journalistic coverage in itself showed the movie was important but deeper inside was an extravagant full page pictorial spread that told readers it would be at the Dixie Theater from the next day, Sunday, February 20, 1949 to the following Thursday. The newspaper also had a regular advertisement for its films which showed too mainstream films playing as a double feature on Friday and Saturday which were its biggest money making days. That same advertisement did however give the “Southern Premiere” of Louisiana Story bigger billing than either of the other two films. But in addition to being extravagant for such a spread in this particular paper it has the following telling lines on the side among others:|

Showing In The South A GEM! Abbeville has been chosen as the “Premiere City for this great film,LOUISIANA STORY, because it was filmed here and stars Vermilion Parish people. It’s- film is the everyday story your friends and your relatives.[2]

The story of Acadiana in the Postwar period is not a simple one and it is not only a story of the Acadian people. But I do want to say more than once that I am discussing Acadian more than Southern or American experience in this paper and Acadians as Southerners and Americans is close to the center of this paper. Some effort is made here to deal with the complexity Acadian identity as its own Academic subject and of that reality of identification and alienation with the South and with the United States which people lived and with the efforts of other — academic historians and otherwise who have attempted to discuss and analyse this complex ethnic identity and its interaction with the structures for identity in the South and in the United States of America. I write this blog version of this paper in distinction to the copy of the speech I posted on the post before last. This one is more of an advertisement than the speech was (and in a sense as a synopsis as well) for a book manuscript. But it is also very much based on the panel format twenty minute lecture and a hoped for academic article. For the real strangers who read my blog I want to make sure they understand here that this is a story about people with whom I most identify in the Cajuns and also about the photographic family around the world with whom I identify as well (although these days who does not?). I also identify elsewhere but have no real claim to identifying with the oil industry — I have not been untouched by it. In fact it has shaped so much of my life I would have to write a specialized autobiography to detail all its impacts but they have been the connections of an outsider. I am a Cajun and a photographer but I am not an oilman. I am writing mostly about the Cajuns and am discussing a people with a complex identity. It was a welcome but very real challenge to set up the research and writing which I have already done in terms of the topic I proposed to the conference. The reemergence of American identity in the region is in fact a very important theme in the manuscript but it does not structurally have its own chapter but is woven in with other large and somewhat related themes.

Merely to attempt to discuss the reemergence of American identity begs the question of what identities were prevalent. Am old friend of mine who is a Southern historian made some interesting comments about Southerners feeling American again as soon as he was aware of the title of the paper. That is certainly a relevant identity in this paper as I have tried to describe. I do not in anyway mean to assert that any of these identities were not American in the sense of being excluded from a valid sense of American participation and civilization. I post this blog post just a couple of weeks before America’s presidential election. American identity has been an issue in this political season from the statements by some in the Black Lives Matter Movement and among some Muslims and Hispanics which have expressed alienation in different ways. The process of alienation for those people is different from what I describe in my third point. In fact any identities preceding or following such alienation would have a very different history. But I cannot post this without mentioning the relevance of the issue.

There also seems to be among many today not only a concern about the effects of whatever is undesirable or excessive immigration but also the effect of an uncertainty about what if any shared ideals or exemplars of Americanism remain at the center of our focus of identity. Our current President who had a Kenyan father and an Indonesian stepfather and two of those who claim to be his intended political opponents — Donald Trump who married a pair of immigrants and only one native born American and Ted Cruz who was born in Canada to an immigrant father who once extolled Castro — we must all celebrate that these people are the essence and very distillation of American identity in human form are we do not belong in polite society. I presented this paper at the Admiral Hotel in Mobile and it is named for my fellow Catholic, fellow American, fellow traveler to many lands and fellow devoted resident of the Gulf South. He was also a Confederate and this year has been a year to see many crises related to the significance of Confederate monuments and their connection to American identity. I am one of those who thinks Raphael Semmes should keep on being an American. So Confederate Identity is for me an American Identity but it is not central to this paper. It was however central to both the zenith of the first Cajun -American identity and the collapse of that first Cajun -American identity.

The questions raised by evaluating the inclusiveness of American identity are looked at a bit more in my book. However, I mean specifically I really mean to say that the reemergence of Cajuns and other people in Acadiana as persons who said confidently — “I am an American” has a place in our understanding of the Postwar era in the South. In preparing this paper I rejoined a lapsed thirty-odd year correspondence with Dr. Mark Schultz of Lewis University with whom I once attended the Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. From his own specialty he has assured me that the Fourth of July was not celebrated in Hancock County Georgia until World War I.[3] It is of course important for me at this conference especially to take into account themes and causes of alienation which relate to the entire South as it emerged from the Confederate experience.

The relative complexity of different aspects of local identity are perhaps raised well enough to be reasonably evident in one of the last articles that the Meridional featured on the Louisiana Story.

LOUISIANA STORY—A REVIEW Premiere Film Uses New Technique To Tell Story Of State Marshes

By Gene Yoes, Jr.

“Louisiana Story”, the great documentary film about the marshes ‘ of Louisiana and of Vermilion parish has come and gone. Behind it, it leaves some who did not appreciate the picture But the vast majority of those who saw the stirring film acclaim it as magnificent “Louisiana Story” is the recital of ‘ the life of an Acadian fur trapper’s son—told through the all-seeing eyes of a camera It is a true to life story, a story that is happening every day in the marshes at our back door It shows the fur trapper’s son, played by young Boudreaux, as a child of nature almost untouched by the synthetic mechanized world we live in.

But, as the story develops, we see this child’s playground, the marshes, invaded by an oil exploration crew. We see the ordinary calm of his life, at first, disturbed, later altered, by the man-made machinery.’ Then, the oil company leaves. Left behind is a child who feels empty because of its departure!, but a child who very easily slips back into his normal, everyday way of life. Two of the most magnificent sequences in the film were presented without the use of words—a technique that is new, and many times as powerful as the shopworn phrases of Hollywood. After the oil well had “blown out” with dangerous underground gas and. water, the crew was waiting! for orders to move to another location The child, in his desire to keep his newly found friends from leaving, poured the contents of his evil-spirit-chasing-salt into the well to remove the “hex” that was causing the well to “blow out”. This dramatically demonstrated the change in the child, his acceptance of this new mode of life. In the other sequence, the child was fondling his new rifle that his father had bought in the city. His pet raccoon, which he thought had been devoured by the alligator, returned. The child dropped his new rifle, and went to his coon. “Told” without the use of dialogue, this sequence powerfully shows the child as he rejects the mechanized world, the artificial world created by machinery, and returns to his native environment, to his native way of living. Some have said that the film gives a “bad impression” of this area of Louisiana, that it presents this area as a large swamp. But, we think that they may have missed the point of the story. At the beginning of the film, it is implicitly stated that the movie was made in one particular locale, Bayou Petit Anse.

It is true that the people of the Northern part of the United States may believe that all of Louisiana is a swamp. “Louisiana Story” will not change their opinion—no amount of films or stories can change them. But, after seeing this film, we are sure that the occupant of a penthouse on the richest ground in New York would gladly exchange his property for the property of John La-tour or any property in the marshes of Louisiana that are capable of spouting black, liquid gold. Robert Flaherty’s product was not an ordinary film—it was not’ made with the flourish that is typical of Hollywood films. For its locale, the producer picked the area around Bayou Petite Anse in Vermilion parish. For its star, Flaherty picked native Acadians—Lionel LeBlanc of Abbeville, Joseph Carl Boudreaux of Little Pecan Island.

The cost of the film was less than one-fourth that of a Hollywood production—but the film has been acclaimed as great by the New York Times, New York Post, New York Mirror, Harper’s Magazine, the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald-Tribune, Life and Star. And the comments of many of those who saw the film here—Miss Evelyn Parkinson Keyes, (noted author), W. B. Cotten, Jr., (Baton Rouge), F. A. Godchaux, Sr., Mr. and Mrs. W. B. MacMillan, Mr. and Mrs. Matt Vernon (Daily Iberian), President and Mrs. Joel Fletcher of Southwestem Louisiana Institute, and many others echoed those reviews[4].

I am writing from a place of identification with the American mainstream and society not much different, really than that of Gene Yoes Jr., my predecessor in writing for our town’s local newspaper — and it is our town’s paper. Gene Yoes Jr. was writing not as an academic but as a community journalist, yet he raised some issues that should interest historians. His review is not a mere reportage of fact. He is attempting the sorts of analysis and evaluation which I hope that we all attempt. I am writing a paper which is intended to face any academic critic or institution on its own technically sophisticated intellectually complex ground but the basic conceptual structure of the paper is not particularly complex. The title suggests that the Cajuns and Acadiana had an American identity in the past and it was then hidden, eclipsed, degraded or obscured and was emerging again in the postwar era. This period when the American identity returned to prominence was captured in some way and affected in a variety of ways by the great documentary projects undertaken with the funding and support of Standard Oil of New Jersey. The result of this renewed sense of American identity has some kind of historic importance and its study has some significance to the scholars who might attend this conference. The Second World War I will argue was blip in the upward direction or more than a blip in that period of generally increasing alienation. Cajuns serving in France in that war forged a sense of Cajun identity with a connection to the United States and the American way of life. But that did not produce the results the Second World War produced. It was after this First World War that French was outlawed in public schools.

The study of change over time requires, I believe, a flexibility of mind which allows us to see how the subtle experience of connections to the past may change over time. The World Wars both speak to my period of 1943 to 1953 and so does the Confederacy. The admiral who was the name patron of this paper’s original venue was an officer in the Confederate navy during the American Civil War fighting for Dixie and the movie house in which the Flaherty film premiered in Abbeville was called the Dixie theater. Here you will see it called bothe the Dixie and the Frank’s. Prior to being a strong Confederate, Semmes had been a serving officer in the United States Navy from 1826 through 1860, the Acadian Confederate general Mouton mentioned here also served under the United States flag but much more briefly. His identity thereafter is the sort of thing historians can and I think should argue about, because our discussions are likely to be both more civil and more productive than most and are likely to better inform others who will struggle with issues of identity.[5] In turn, these people will have a better chance of reaching good resolutions to the crises which impel them to various forms of struggle if they have been properly informed. Since being invited to give this presentation I have incorporated these few words about Admiral Semmes and have decided to mention as well that when thinking of the American Civil War a person like me who is not a specialist in the area remembers that Semmes was captain of the cruiser CSS Alabama, which I have been informed was the most successful commerce raider in maritime history. What I would not remember is that late in the war, he was not only promoted to rear admiral but also served briefly as a brigadier general in the Confederate army. Semmes is the only North American to have held both exalted naval and army ranks simultaneously. Semmes was also an accomplished and skilled writer who among other things sought to understand American history — I was proud to have him as my ghostly inspiration in excerpting this paper from my book.

It is interesting that one name which does not appear in the article is the name of a man who may have been mentioned more often in the Abbeville Meridional during his lifetime than any other local person and possibly more often than any other person at all. However, I cannot say that I have actually counted all possible contenders and only that in my research I have not noticed that there were any close contenders. That name is Dudley Leblanc — he is also a very relevant name and someone who features prominently in the book. About a month and a little bit more ago I saw the opening of an exhibit which I jointly curated on the life of Dudley Leblanc and his achievements. It is important to say that whatever evolutions are transitions occurred in Acadian identity in the postwar era they occurred in direct interaction with this particular man and his particular life and work which involved making lots of money in business, giving lots of money to charity, having French language radio shows, holding and running for political offices and writing books important to those in this small field of history. However he has not usually been seen as relevant to the SONJ documentary projects by anyone at all. But in my work his is one of the lives that continues to matter in this as in all other aspects of life and public affairs in the Acadiana region for quite a significant period of time. This period like many others is marked largely by being in the life of Dudley Leblanc as far as Acadiana is concerned. This man is relatively complex in many ways and compared to people who are identified with a single pursuit above all others it is less obvious what his position might be as regards any other data in society but despite not being so famous elsewhere and requiring a bit of work to understand Leblanc stands as a useful reference point in this paper and in the larger manuscript. The life he lived is a stark reminder of continuity across all the periods from the prewar period through World War II and on into the postwar period. In fact Dudley Leblanc has a much longer period of regional significance even than the period combining all of these periods. He was surely always an American and always an Acadian and so one can ask what significance there is in examining his life in the terms laid out for this paper. But I do think he allows us to see the very shift that is discussed here although not in a stark way. But the Cajuns are and always have been devoted to the American experience and identity even during the long spell between about 1875 and 1940 when most Cajuns only called themselves Americans in a legal or very formal and explicit context. Nonetheless, in all those years there was an effort to merge effectively with each era of American institutions. But the Cajun vision of America did not always resemble the mainstream vision very closely: Nonetheless, in understanding a man like Dudley Leblanc it is useful to understand this desire to succeed as a true American and to see Cajuns succeed as true Americans. This second glimpse from the Meridional shows that aspect of Leblanc and of Cajun life as well. It does so in a subtle and not very flag-waving kind of way. I do not object to certain amount of advocacy in Academic history nor do I see any lack of it either. Two very important texts on Acadian identity are the books Acadian to Cajun[6] and Acadiana: Louisiana’s Historic Cajun Country[7]. Each does a good job in a very different way of laying out how the Cajun people and the region called Acadiana came to identify as they do. But they treat of formative processes which are not exactly where our particular interests as we gather for my section of this discussion will be found. Likewise the authorized biography of Dudley Leblanc by Trent Angers[8] is also not exactly the image of Leblanc which will emerge in this paper. Knowing Dudley to be in fact a voice and a symbol deeply associated with Cajun identity we find him not particularly alienated as far as signs of functioning within the American and Southern mainstream long before World War II.

The Chamber of Commerce in Lafayette at that time and in any part of the United States at any time is an institution devoted to the relatively optimistic pursuit of commerce, development and well being in the context of the commercially viable and economically vibrant United States of America. Dudley Leblanc who was not less an ethnic activist than many other form better known communities, was also a member of the Chamber of Commerce and accepted most of its values and vision for America.

HADACOL was once the second largest advertiser in the United States.

Acadiana had never been in its very substantial historical tenure — and Acadians have never been in their much longer tenure — isolated in the sense that a handful of places are which is one of the big questions raised by Flaherty’s selection of the Cajun Country for Louisiana Story. Alienation and isolation are of course very different things. These days we wonder if Mr. Colin Kaepernick is alienated from American identity are not — but we know he is not isolated from it[10]. Some are offended by his stance and others are quite energized by it[11]. Rather it had always been a place of commerce, change and migration since the time the first Cajuns began to emerge as such. In this text one of the challenges has been to try to show an ethnic community which is in continuous change within a larger American social and cultural context. Dudley J. Leblanc was a voice for the region and also for the Cajun people. It is important to understand the totality of his involvement in the issues of his time and the life of the state and the region. The questions of whether he lived in better times or worse for the Cajuns and for this region cannot be answered fully here. But to the degree that this text sees him as an influence over the SONJ Projects and over the region that they came to document he must be properly understood or nothing much is gained by way of understanding in referring to his influence. In some of the earlier chapters my book length manuscript the concern with Dudley Leblanc is focussed very largely on his role and influence and exemplary status as regards Cajun or Acadian identity. His role a President of the Association of Louisiana Acadians is a single fact which removes all question of his significance as a representative of the ethnic community in question and as a valuable point of reference for anyone seeking to understand that culture. Leblanc also wrote two books about the Acadians. The True Story of the Acadians[12] which features the word Story in its title along with the documentary film which I am discussing. This book appeared in two versions before the SONJ projects began. The latter book appeared long after they had left — that book was The Acadian Miracle[13]. I was privileged over the last few months to be one of two curators of and exhibit at the Acadian Museum in Erath recognizing the life and work of Dudley Leblanc and celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Acadian Miracle. The two Leblanc books have also been released again in new editions in honor of this anniversary and in conjunction with this exhibit. While working on this exhibit my fellow curator and the Museum Director Warren Perrin received into the possession of the Museum the diary of Corinne Broussard and we spent quite a bit of time discussing by email. Corinne Broussard was later to marry and change her last name to Murphy but her brother was the Louisiana State Senator Sam Broussard who would go on to being a major participant in the founding of an organization known as CODOFIL or the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana. He was also the featured central figure in the Pat Mire film Mon Cher Camarade which among other things was able to receive significant air time on Louisiana Public Broadcasting[14]. Broussard along with the still living Robert Leblanc of Abbeville were among the Cajuns who by character and dialect played a unique role in the intelligence operations of the United States military in France during the Second World War.[15] This was her diary of her time in pilgrimage as an Evangeline Girl with Dudley Leblanc in 1930 on the pilgrimage of return to old Acadie or Nova Scotia. Whatever else one might say about Dudley Leblanc there is really no reasonable argument to be made that he was not a prominent, well connected and highly visible symbol of the Acadian and Cajun people. The Documentarians cannot be excused if they gave him less than reasonable recognition as such a symbol. The Evangeline Girls are somewhat known in Louisiana and somewhat more known in Acadiana and fairly well known among ethnically conscious Cajuns. But that does not mean much is known about them. Most people in Louisiana are possibly at least vaguely familiar with a fact related to the Evangeline Girls but they are unaware that this fact is related to the Evangeline Girls. One of Corinne Broussard’s companions on her journey was Yvonne Pavy who five years later was married to a very gifted and prominent physician Carl Weiss who assassinated Huey Long for his assaults against her standing and that of her family. Weiss was able to return Dudley Leblanc to full participation in the life of the State with a single bullet because Huey had in effect driven him into economic exile in Texas. [16] In my book I am eager to point out the difference in the way that Harnett Kane’s book on the Cajuns was treated by the documentarians in contrast to all of work, activity and writing produced by Dudley Leblanc[17]. But aside from a few interstitial parts and a chapter dedicated wholly to him my study is not one of the very interesting Leblanc. Mostly my treatment of him has been the only focus of discussion in this regard of there being a compelling ethnic figure and some brief applications of that aspect of his life and work to the film Louisiana Story. I get into a bit more depth in my current version of one chapter devoted to him and I think that should I find a publisher I would edit the whole book to treat of him in a more compelling way; but a great deal more remains to be put into writing about his life discussed if he is to be at all understood. Trent Angers has written an authorized biography [18]and Dudley Leblanc’s own granddaughter Michelle has produced a compelling film for public television and other distribution[19]. Those are good places to start for those interested as is the Acadian Museum in Erath. That website, for which I can take no credit whatsoever, has good brief biographies of those inducted as Living Legends and that roll includes some people mentioned or cited in this paper. The Postwar period is one in which Dudley Leblanc was associated mostly with HADACOL the second largest advertiser in the United States of America at one time. But his role as a voice of the Cajun people was ongoing and anyone studying those people in the region itself could not really avoid knowing about his many activities on behalf of the community. Nonetheless, he was less of an ethnic symbol during the relevant postwar years discussed in my current work and at which time these Documentarians were active than at many other times earlier and later in his life.

The postwar period is interesting to me in terms of its significance for the sense of American identity taking shape among the Cajun people. That would make it compelling for me in any regard. However, the really singular reason I have focused on this period is because it is the time when the Standard Oil of New Jersey documentarians under Stryker and Flaherty went to work in Acadiana. They were of course paid by the oil industry. However the oil industry is far more than merely the source of funding which occasioned the documentarians coming to the region. The oil industry had a really good reason to hire these people — they were a powerful and influential change agent in the Acadiana region and in the United States of America which was defining the postwar era in many ways. They provided an economic focus and vision and set of opportunities which could at least approach the importance of defeating the Axis powers. They stepped in as much as any other force to show a future which an America and an Acadiana shaped by the Second World War could accept. A vision of a powerful economy, well organized and technically superior to its past was part of the American identity achieved in the crucible of World War II. The Oil industry would also offer a future for an America with a powerful economy, a well organized workforce and a path to sustained technical superiority to its competitors.

In my unpublished manuscript Emerging Views: Postwar Acadiana, The Louisiana Story and the SONJ Documentary Projects[20] I have the scope to discuss quite a few aspects of regional identity which will not be included in this paper. In Chapter Twelve I remark that Dudley Leblanc’s thirty-fourth birthday party was an occasion for him to receive a kind of tribute from people from a variety of industries but not the petroleum industry. It is also true that we have discussed how the Broussard Brothers became a very successful firm and remains so today but its growth as a major named focus in the oil industry on the Attakapas Prairie has been a fairly slow process. The firm was located mostly in Chalmette at first and then has gradually assumed more prominence in the region. Only in recent years has it bought the prominent and fairly stately office building in a leafy neighborhood where it now holds sway.Chris Crusta Flying Services was operated by Danny Babin of the Gueydan area and by Chris Crusta of Abbeville. Both were pilots with distinguished military careers however, the firm which provided crop dusting services across the Parish for many years also helped to launch the business career of one of the leading figures in the oilfield in Vermilion Parish and the Prairies. Revis Sirmon was a French speaking native of the region whose family farmed rice and who married a Cajun girl, name Lorraine Breaux, many of his closest friends were Cajuns. Yet Revis Sirmon was a distinctly non Cajun person with his own set of folklore and religious experiences shaping his life. His close relationship with the wealthy rice-milling Godchaux family was a relationship with a white Creole family. Possibly there both not being Cajun entirely formed a common part of their identity in the intensely Cajun region. Revis Sirmon flew fifty combat missions in Europe in World War II and loved to fly. However, after a few years of of the risks of agricultural aviation and with two small children to worry about leaving orphaned he was ready to spend more time on the ground. He went into the oilfield fluids business called the mud business with the backing of Frank Godchaux III. Revis Sirmon’s memoirs, Eternal Pilot, a book co-written with Joseph Chaillot do a good job of charting his life in Acadiana and the tensions between Cajun identity and residence in Acadiana.[21] They also provide a useful glimpse of his rise in the local oilfield world and its ties to world commerce and it also is true that the book like so much else describes many people whom I knew well although it also leaves out a great deal and a great number of people whom I know were involved in the events described. But whatever angle on takes in viewing these things it is different than the take of a book like this one, the scholar has to bring something to the research as it is not the book’s purpose to address any or all of these questions directly. Revis Sirmon was encouraged by the ethnically prominent Charles Broussard of the Flying J. Ranch to ask Edwin Edwards (who has always identified as Cajun) to appoint him to the Mineral Board, while in that position he raised the royalty payments made to the State for mineral leases. However, as an active commercial oilman he was disqualified from future service after seven fairly distinguished years on the board when new ethics rules defined his operations as a conflict of interest. He resigned rather than before the newly propounded rules would have formally disqualified him. My maternal grandfather was in business with Revis Sirmon in a company called Riptide Investors and in developing a port known as Freshwater City. However, almost all of this oilfield story is outside the scope of this book. Almost all but not quite all. It was in 1953, the very end of this period that the pilot known as the Scatterbrain Kid founded his mud company. This was just one more sign of the growing importance of the oilfield and related industries in the immediate region where Louisiana Story had been filmed.

Humble Oil and Standard Oil lend their names to the Fourteenth chapter of my manuscript and especially the capitalization of the words Humble and Standard in its chapter title “A Relatively Humble Standard”. They have since merged but at the time of the focus of this study from 1943 to 1953 they were both relatively autonomous and certainly legally independent corporations and each had a distinct and significant role that they played in the production of these photographic projects and the film Louisiana Story. The two companies had national and global connections and so forth but both came from distinct regions in the United States outside of Louisiana where they retained significant rootedness. It is not easy to minimize the importance of the oil industry and of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Humble Oil in the production of these projects more than has been done here without leaving aside a very significant part of the story indeed. The truth is that cramming what is left of the essential parts of that story into one chapter is not an entirely satisfying solution either. But it is the solution which is achievable in this case. The story of the making of Louisiana Story has been told before. No telling other than the Louisiana Public Broadcasting television documentary Louisiana Story: The Reverse Angle has really attempted to relate the film to Cajun realities on the ground very much at all in my opinion[22]. The film A Boatload of Wild Irishmen has touched on the Cajun and Louisiana side of the experience in significant ways in its attempt to see the otherside of all Flaherty’s work. But the most interesting previously published source relevant to the Louisiana Story aspect of my research is probably Filming Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story”: The Helen van Dongen Diaries.[23] In this book among other things there are the useful Abbeville entries in Van Dongen’s diary. That book makes a good attempt to deal at least briefly with the role that the oil industry played in the film. Standard Oil with very specific postwar concerns is perhaps the best claim or connection that this paper has to the attention and interest of participants in this Conference. What were those interests?

The best source I have for that comes from a video recording form archived film which is attached here and there and not easy to footnote for a scholar of very limited means such as myself. Some issuings of Louisiana Story on DVD include in the special features an interview given by the widowed Frances Flaherty to Robert Gardner at Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1960, discussing her husband and collaborator the great filmmaker, Robert Flaherty, who died in 1951. In that article the widow, co-writer and photographer reads from a letter sent by Standard Oil of New Jersey to Robert Flaherty which launched the great collaboration between the Father of Documentary Film and the Oil Industry. The letter in part proposes that Flaherty produce a film that would be:

“A classic—a permanent artistic record of the contributions in which the oil industry had made to civilization. A film that would present the story of oil with dignity, the epic sweep it deserved, and assure the story of a lasting place on the highest plane in the literature of the screen. The film would also be such an absorbing human story that it would stand on its own feet as an entertainment anywhere. Because of its entertainment value it would be distributed theatrically, through the regular motion picture houses, both in America and abroad.”

Frances Flaherty refers to this as a princely commission. That adjective is not only justified by the obvious ambition and ego driven nature of the letter of proposal but is also justified by the check for $125,000, the granting of almost all imaginable right to Flaherty and the way in which the physical first print of the film was to be preserved as an academic treasure. Further than this the company made Humble Oil resources available to Flaherty at reduced or in many cases no cost and used its vast influence in postwar Acadiana to open many doors to Flaherty, his unit and the other documentarians associated with him. The ambition of the Oil Industry coming out of the World War is surely very important in understanding American history of this period. The fifth and six points of my listed argument can be paraphrased as stating that we can see something about what the oil industry hoped to accomplish by looking at this set of images. When we combine this view of what the industry was attempting with what we learn about how the Acadians were we can find in the focus of this study I believe allows for a very specific and clear insight into that ambitious and vigorous postwar identity which formed and continues to form American life and society.[24]

The period of 1943 to 1953 includes two enormous wars — yet I use the term postwar. This is not only laziness or brevity this is an era which is not quite the same as many others. Many participants in the Korean war outside the two Koreas usually define the period as a time following World War II and not as one leading into and involving the Korean War. China is able to look at The Great Leap Forward and overlook the Korean War to a significant degree. Americans, Brits, Japanese and the rebuilding Europeans are able to find many domestic concerns that seem more important to history than the Korean War despite the fact that it was large and bloody and its legacy is still with us. The countries that did not fight with the United Nations were still affected by the war in some way — but my book is no different. The Korean War is tangential to my interests here and is partly so because it was so well ignored at the time. In the minds of many writers there is a sense that simply in being read at all there is a dimension of victory. For those in an intense and broad struggle of ideas that are not very compatible being read seems to indicate that the writers side has won through, because the writer feels, his or her opponents are by and large through with reading the sort of things the writer is producing.Cajuns and other people in Acadiana were not extremely and broadly concerned about the SONJ documentary projects. That is one of the most definitive realities that cannot be escaped as one researches the response to the documentarians and to Flaherty’s somewhat autonomous film crew within the Stryker SONJ organization. These creative and observant outsiders were the objects of gossip and news-gathering but they were not major objects of either. Largely, this is a story of a people caught up in a period defined by the end of a war they did not believe was going to lead to any certain and enduring peace. As a whole the regional press was very concerned with rebuilding Germany and Japan, with the threat of Communism and with what would happen to the economy, The press also reported on the progress of the oil and gas industry in the region and the country, Movies also commanded some attention. But reporting on the SONJ projects as such was limited. Neither do I allow my own intense interest in these activities to distort the portrayal of the larger response to what was being done and thus to distort the story more than I can help it. The documentarians on the other hand show little sense that they had sold out their integrity and point of view to big oil. They seem to me to be aware that they are creating serious work in a documentary tradition that would stand alone before the judgement of history. Whatever greatness we believe the documentary tradition to have, we remain condemned by their words and efforts if we do not consider these projects to have been part of that tradition.So in terms of influence and identity we have a number of relationships to try to keep in mind. First there is the relationship of the war which was ending or had ended during the SONJ documentary activities. The war affected everyone and everything and in terms of forming identities and shaping what America itself was becoming. Then there is the relationship of the Oil industry and Standard Oil itself (together with Humble Oil) to America’s war efforts, to the State of Louisiana, to the Acadian people and to the documentarians who were hired for these projects. Next there is the relationship of the people doing the work other than the Cajuns in Flaherty’s cast and crew to either New England or to some other region through New England and their sense of belonging to a community of New York Documentarians in which the Flaherty’s and Roy Stryker as leaders and many others as individuals had achieved some recognition. The perspective of that documentarian community continues to inform a great deal of the scholarship, journalism and analysis which defines any understanding of these projects which does in fact exist. In the rest of this paper we will look at this film and the documentary process as Louisiana and Acadian history. Scholarly, technical and critical writing about Flaherty and the Louisiana Story, has almost entirely come from a perspective other than that of Louisiana history. The big exception is the film Louisiana Story: The Reverse Angle as mentioned elsewhere. None would argue that Flaherty who produced and directed the film depicting the wetlands oilfields of the 1940s intended to produce an academic history. Yet at the very least, his film forms a small part of the history of the region. It was largely from the study of outsiders’ perceptions of assimilation and persistence and especially as it related to what they did and did not wish to shoot that this essay on the Louisiana Story emerged as a tentative thesis proposal many years ago. Because the time and place of Flaherty’s production was studied from a more general historical perspective, the film has emerged in the context of influences which have not yet received much attention. Louisiana Story differs from Flaherty’s first film Nanook of the North which creatively documented the hunting life of an Eskimo family. The principal character was in fact named Nanook, the places filmed were actually his hunting grounds and the family was actually his family. Louisiana Story was not a documentary of a place or a culture in the same way as Nanook of the North.[25] Rather, Flaherty’s last film was a fine piece of drama and myth in film. But it was a film where real Cajun clothes-makers, pirogue wrights, trappers and animal wranglers among others were employed to do things that Cajuns really did. It employed a real Cajun cast and it was beautifully shot and edited. In fact it may have been harder to sell a film name Lionel of the manicured Jungle Gardens Park than one named Nanook of the North. there is plenty of opportunity to discuss the ethics and values of the project but it is neither all one thing or all another. That has been written before and will be repeated again.

Louisiana Story uses a relatively small Cajun cast and a few Standard Oil and Humble Oil people directed by Standard Oil of New Jersey but these people were in fact part of a meaningful ethnic community with an evolving ethnic identity in which the Oil industry is playing a transformative role. One must not look here for a great anthropological or cultural history research project in fact the use of people of no great numbers for a modest cast overall and achieves an economy both perceptual and financial. Yet this was not a very cheap film not is it a nature film with just an odd human shiot now and then, Given the small number of words, the audience achieves a surprising rapport with these few characters. Yet each character is a type even more than a person. One little boy, one father, one mother and one driller allows the audience to focus on the impact of the oil industry upon Acadians and their wetlands, and the universal meanings associated with changing times and the dreamlike state of childhood. Like the walrus scene and sequence in Nanook involving the hunt, the alligator scene combined some authentic action with a touch of highly improbable drama.

Most important to me and to the work I am doing but perhaps less in tune to the Conference theme is the relationship of the Acadians or Cajuns to the United States of America, to the State of Louisiana, to the South and to the other peoples and places which were specifically linked to their own heritage. Identity is formed in the interplay of relationship very often and that interplay can be very complex. I am also interested in how Cajuns have continued to relate back to these events and their product such as the photographs and Louisiana Story. It is in that relationship of the Cajuns with their past that we can really see what last effect the postwar period and these images and image maker may have had on forming American identity or what impact they may have had on anything else for that matter.

That past goes back to the long history hinted at in the first point of my chronological list. This is a point which Dudley Leblanc would discuss at length in his books. The book that existed in the 1943 to 1953 period has the word “Story” in its title and I believe Leblanc played a role in moving the Flaherty’s from the type of film outlined in the “Christmas Tree” as first written and into Louisiana Story. The Flaherty’s were talkative but also secretive and disingenuous — it may well be that this word is a nod to Leblanc’s influence in the development of their screenplay. But whatever, the case it is history in that sense discussed in the first point of my outline which most defines the Acadian people. However, there is another aspect of history which is very important — that is the historical moment at which these things occurred. things changed a lot in ways more subtle that battlefield events between 1943 and 1953.

It is not worthwhile to simplify a comparison of Donald Frederick who died in Abbeville and who is mentioned again a bit further down in this paper and Whitney Leblanc whose Korean war record was kept in obscurity for most of his life in which he survived in the United States after the War they lived and fought in two very different wars and the fact that the Korean War forms a blurry end to the postwar era for me and many others is an indication of how hidden it is. Clay Blair ‘s book on Korea titled The Forgotten War[26]seems to have more than a little currency and relevance — nobody much refers to these years as America’s Korean War Period. But the era does seems to be different in subtler ways that affect both perceptions of war and peace. Acadiana seems to have joined a more individualistic America than when it named a street for Donald Frederick after Pearl Harbor. In 1953 Whitney Adam Leblanc of Iberia Parish was involved in one of the most bloody and violent encounters in U.S. Military history. Nobody was making a movie about his experience or carefully documenting his days in pitched battle in still photographs. He endured a great deal in battle and afterwards his records were confused or misfiled and the consequences of that battlefield confusion stayed with him later on. By the time the Battle of Pork Chop Hill was over his family had more or less lost track of him for a while. It may not be much more than a coincidence but there is an individualism within a broad national context that seems to describe and define Whitney Allen Leblanc’s wartime homecoming. Years later after some deliberate restorations of ethnic and regional institutions had been made his son Roger would help to restore his war record to good order. In 1953 he was somehow more than a little bit alone in that vast and terrible conflict. This bloody combat would be portrayed in The Battle of Pork Chop Hill, a movie that focussed only on the last few days of what was actually the longest battle in the Korean War. That movie lay in the future, the film and the lasting name of the battle came from the shape of the hill on a contour map most soldiers never saw. But those who were there fighting related to the name because it was a place where men did not merely die but were reduced to chops of flesh lying about unburied on display. Surely an incident like that ought to define this year, but graphic and significant as the Korean War may have been for the Cajuns who fought in the war or lost loved ones in it it has little to do with this study except to mention that it had so little influence on the regional experience of daily life as a whole. There seems in many ways to be little connection between the year at war as the troops lived it and the experience of being or observing Cajuns in 1953 I am mostly considering those experiences at the end of my book length text, I choose to include the Korean War in this paper because it suggests significant social change. We consider a year marked not by great violence and risk but by a sense of being caught between the past and the future.

The complexity is hidden in the lack of significant events that marked the lives of most Cajuns who did not serve in the Korean War. Acadian history is not uneventful and this period contrasts with many others as not being so starkly distinguished by conflict and upheaval as many other periods in history. There is no Grand Derangement, no War of American Independence, no War of 1812, no Civil War, no Reconstruction and the great turmoil of the Civil Rights Era in the Deep South had not yet begun. It is pardonable and perhaps even reasonable that many people would look at this era and see it as a peaceful, prosperous and optimistic time. Many people both within and outside the Cajun community more or less take that view of the 1950s as a happy, prosperous and optimistic time.Just after our period of 1953, in 1957 came the turmoil of hurricane Audrey, a terror to great to describe here. J.C. Boudreaux lost his first house to a hurricane in that storm and would lose another in hurricane Rita which came the same season as the more famous Katrina which was featured in Angels of the Basin.[27] Robert Leblanc the Brigadier General whose life is a part of the framework of this story was at the forefront in fighting the horrors and devastation of the storm with the largely Cajun units he commanded in the National Guard. But aside from hurricane Audrey many Cajuns take a positive view of the fifties and among those who take that view there is usually a fairly positive view of the oil and gas industry. It is not the intention of this text to see the region as merely an oil producing region. Many other forms of economic activity and employment survived. But for many Cajuns oil and gas related activity provided the main chance for a good future and survival in the present era.

My own view is that in this period a new sense of being American emerged. This is something I have looked at especially as regards the Acadian or Cajun People and really the other peoples of the region are discussed only in reference to their experience and changing perceptions of themselves and perceptions of them by other people. That shifting perception which forms the other side of evolving identity is treated seriously as relevant to emerging social challenges and tensions across the South and across the United States of America. Compressed as this paper is for this purpose what appears in this paper can be summarized as being a more nuanced view than has sometimes been taken of what this period meant for the United States, Louisiana and the South. I simply refuse to reduce the elements of the era into a simple statement of what the realities might be if they were conveniently organized for the benefit of scholars. It makes easier lesson plans, textbooks and lecture formats if a period is either optimistic or anxious. It makes for simpler and clearer political history if this is a time of ascending or declining cultural identity. What I believe to be the case that for Cajuns in 1953 America was in a period of fairly rapid transformation which had both threatening and promising possibilities.

So if my first point is summed up as that Acadian history did not begin in the United States in World War II. It is important to remember that in the 1943 book by Harnett T. Kane which very much influenced the documentarians he briefly and poorly discusses that history as he launches into a current description of the people called Cajuns. His book Bayous of Louisiana formed the template for their work. Flaherty, I argue added some influence from Dudley Leblanc experience as a leader of the current people and his writing about their past.

The Acadian Miracle by Dudley Leblanc is fifty years old this year.

This is a glimpse of how the black and white film was presented to the world. The local papers ran black and white promotional and reporting spreads.

In addition one has to concede that the Second World War is a factor in the reemergence of American identity among Cajuns or Acadians but not the creator of that identity from nothing. Rather, the French and Indian Wars, the American Revolution and the War of 1812 were all American experiences of war along with the vents leading into and out of those wars which were more deeply defining of a specific Cajun identity within the American Identity and alongside the American identity in their own minds as Cajuns. The Acadians of the 1840s to 1860s had Cajun governors. Cajuns led the Louisiana Secession Committee before the Civil War. Longfellow and Andrew Jackson in very different ways had incorporated their story into the fabric of the American story and made in them a sense of union incarnate. In the late 1850s they fought bloody battles among themselves to determine the kind of American vision they would support. In that period they had a fully developed American identity. The first Louisiana Constitution was written in French and English and in the 1840s there were laws passed assuring public schools with English Only, French Only and bilingual education would exist. But in the defeat of the South in the Civil war, the prohibition of French in schools in the 1920s, even the publication of Parkman’s history there were huge alienating factors. The term American came to identify people who were not Acadian or Cajun within the Cajun community. Today it does not mean that and Cajuns generally feel and believe that they are Americans. In my booklength manuscript I discuss each of the facts asserted here but in this paper cannot do so. Here my sole focus — rambling as it may seem to some of you — is the reemergence of American identity in the postwar era. That is complicated because the sturdy involves varied groups of Americans. It is also complicated because American identity itself was changing. But I view the postwar era as crucial to the reemergence of American identity in postwar Acadiana.

The moment in history when the documentary makers came to South Louisiana was a very specific moment. Sam Broussard was serving in Europe in the Second World War and at some point was devoted to leading specifically Cajun men as bilingual operatives and translators dealing with the French Resistance and underground orMaquis against the Nazi occupation. Broussard did a good job of documenting these adventures and worked with New Orleans based historian Stephen E. Ambrose in preparing materials for an historian to use in understanding that experience. In recent years with the help of several south Louisiana institutions, Pat Mire and those working with him have done a good job of documenting that service in the military as Cajuns precisely and that service was a key part of that moment in historical documentary film Mon Cher Camarade. Among those featured in the Mire film is this writer’s long time acquaintance and distant relative General Robert Leblanc. The General was then a young man working with the resistance who provided the allies with assistance in securing bridges, guarding prisoners and sabotaging rail transit. The testimony within the Mire film given by sons of Vermilion Parish such as Abbeville’s Leblanc, Erath’s Lee Bernard and others in the film such as Sam Broussard shows that, during World War II, the hundreds of French-speaking Cajun men from South Louisiana enlisted in the U.S. military not only did their duty as American soldiers but did many things that only they as the Cajuns they were could have done. Broussard’s work does not spend much time discussing the fact that the same thing had happened in World War One and that while it was on a much smaller scale than what occurred in World War Two it had the effect of helping to raise the ethnic consciousness of key figures like Dudley Leblanc and his brothers as well as their wives children and associates. The bad times that followed the First World War had not only included the general woes of the Great Depression in the narrowest sense but the struggles of agricultural and waterfront Americans which were a bit unique and cruelly affected all of Acadian heritage regions. But perhaps more often than is recognized some leaders among the Cajuns sent the generation that went to World War II off to war with a definite expectation that they would make a unique contribution in Europe and other Francophone regions and with a determination that if better times followed this war then their contributions should not be forgotten. From the Cajun point of view there were many layers of disappointment and resentment through which to view the world in which they live, Many Cajuns calculated and deeply felt that the linguistic skills and French heritage of the Cajun people had been denigrated for decades in South Louisiana. Despite whatever consciousness had come from the First World War and may have been articulated by a few Cajun leaders this French heritage was, as the testimony of many in Pat Mire’s film points out, ridiculed as well by American officers in the military induction and processing centers at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and Fort Polk, Louisiana. These men would be coming back before our period of interest is over the process had just started in 1943 when we begin to consider the region. But the process would go beyond intelligence units and soon Cajus would be selected for such service across the breadth and depth of the invasion.

Preeminent Cajun and Acadian historian Carl Brasseaux and Acadian and Cajun folklorist Barry Ancelet have noted that the value of the French which resembled the French spoken in the rural areas where the invasion occurred was uniquely valuable to America. That is in addition to the capacity to speak French in general which also had great value. These were men who had been punished for speaking French in school and who had been humiliated by their homeland in various ways for preserving that linguistic and cultural heritage. The film shows as those who are Cajuns are likely to have had their relatives remark that these same somewhat alienated men found that their ability to speak French became of measurably valuable importance to the American war effort in French North Africa and in France and Belgium.

Indeed, Brasseaux points out that the Cajun translators were as important to the American war effort as the now more acclaimed and well known Native American “Code Talkers, ” yet, the Cajun translators’ contributions in this regard have been largely ignored until now. This is an important part of a new look at the American experience, from a South Louisiana perspective. But it is not the whole story my grandfather whose mother was a Leblanc and who was named Frank W. Summers was commanding a ship in the Pacific and his brother who also a Summers named for the antebellum Vigilante Severin Leblanc their ancestor and mine — they and other Cajuns did their duty in a theater where French was rarely needed. The Cajun G.I.s of World War II were American citizens, they served everywhere Americans in large numbers served but their cultural pedigree was relevant to the European theater and their prowess in war there was a tribute to something other than the typical American experience. Their families shared all the experiences that many others had around the country. Those experiences of G.I.s were killed, wounded or came home unscathed to the naked eye as did other troops. The scale of this Cajun involvement can be seen as dwarfed by the scale of the conflict as a whole, by the scale of the American role in that conflict and even by the scale of the involvement of the State of Louisiana in that conflict. However, it is also possible to remember that the Cajuns were a group of people and the launch of individual people who were very much involved in this huge global conflict, in the massive American campaigns and in the role of Louisiana in that war.[28]

C. The Long American History of the Cajuns and the Longstanding Relationship with

and History of Perceptions by New England

The unpublished book from which this paper is derived is as has been said before about two very specific sets of photographs in large part and also very much about the Cajun people and the Acadiana region at the time those photographs were taken. One set taken by those working directly under Roy Stryker is largely a collection of stills and the other although it includes some stills that are part of our story is largely a group of photographs exposed on movie film in movie cameras to make the movie Louisiana Story.[29] But each chapter so far has reminded the reader that perception is conditioned by those doing the perceiving and also tends to have some kind of real effect upon those people and patterns which are perceived. This chapter goes beyond the previous chapters in the depth and seeking to understand what the documentarians employed by Standard Oil were doing. Still however there will not be a great deal of technical sophistication and detail in this part of the study. The aspect of sound as it was operating at the time and specifically in the case of Louisiana Story and the brief mention of other technical aspects of the photographic or cinematic process in only a handful of cases will be worked into study however partially. This does bend some of the conventions of what a history text about South Louisiana might be expected to be but not in the direction of becoming a manual for professional photographers. I like to believe I know a little something about photography but I am far more interested in photographers as regards this text. Taylor Calder-Marshall titled the most authoritative and seminal biography of Robert Flaherty The Innocent Eye and the idea that Flaherty had an innocent point of view and was at his best depicting pristine cultures has been a widely held and broadly supported idea about his work. Thus in title and concept this chapter focuses on Flaherty’s work more than on the SONJ stills although not to the exclusion of that project or its images. How Louisiana Story fits into the body of Flaherty’s work is a question importance in determining how to evaluate it. Some idea of how it is regarded in the scholarship of documentary film can be gleaned from Ronald S. Magliozzi’s biographical essay on Flaherty which appears in the 1998 volume titled Filming Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story: The Helen Van Dongen Story. Magliozzi writes,”Louisiana Story was Flaherty’s return to themes of wilderness, exploration and innocence, and to the style of poetic humanism that distinguished his most highly regarded films.” The context for the view of Cajun culture which was portrayed in the film also has a context within the documentary film community in the largest sense as it existed then and as it exists now. In the same volume just named, in his essay “Discover and Disclose; Helen Van Dongen and Louisiana Story” Richard Barsam discusses Flaherty and reveals how the community of critical and in a sense historical scholars view this body of work by a great American documentarian.

Flaherty’s view of the world was founded not only on a humanistic

faith in man but moreover on a romantic neglect of human evil. This tender vision embraces the human not the material continuum of this world. Flaherty agreed with Rousseau that the most “primitive” or least advanced people are the happiest and the least corrupt and that the arts and sciences that comprise what we call civilization corrupt man’s native goodness. [30]

One may note that in this book terms like sexism and ethno-centricity are sometimes used but so are terms like misogyny and bigotry. It is hard to say how ethnocentric Flaherty may have been as a documentarian and a New Englander viewing the world. But I really do think it is important to remember that he made Man of Aran[31] about the extremely rural part of Irish population coping with the extremes of nature. I feel that Flaherty felt as connected to an Irish sense of identity as much as to any other form of identity with which he was born. If that is even remotely true then it does something to prove along with other evidence that he was not a bigot. He knew the family he created in Louisiana Story was purely fictional and that his actors were quite different from the people they portrayed. However sometimes he seems to have been a bit seduced by his own fiction, perhaps almost any filmmaker would have been seduced by the beauty of the work.

Lionel Leblanc was a real trapper, could really speak French and really knew the wetlands. J.C. Boudreaux really had a way with a pirogue, with animals and really hooked and pulled in an alligator when asked to do so for the film. Evelyn Bienvenue could really cook and keep house in a remote cabin if need be. Choosing these people and not professional actors was part of Flaherty’s integrity. In a later chapter we will Cajun character and mainstream American perception of that character in more detail. However, perhaps here it is fair to ask what the American audience could be expected to accept about anyone like the Cajun trappers. One might argue that cowboys and other groups were portrayed with no greater authenticity and that although almost all of the cowboy films were both openly fictional and set in the past nonetheless the American people were absorbing an image of the cowboy that really people had to live with and which was in various ways misleading. An increasingly urban society may have needed to believe that this in extreme wilderness or rural environments were more “other” than they actually were. Many American communities were still developing a more urban and suburban identity and the a kind of insecurity about this new life in an industrial superpower of large and midsize cities created a need to show that people living and working in the vast wildernesses of this country were not just Americans who had some differences with their countrymen and countrywomen. The people had to be a bit more exotic. I believe the Cajun trappers were a bit exotic. I also believe that Flaherty did not attempt and did not achieve an academic ethnological film capturing their way of life. He created a work of art which preserved some real visual and other information. Flaherty was certainly not unique in bringing a great number of parameters and predispositions to his efforts to portray a subject. Rather he was normal in that regard.

We must remember what was uniquely Cajun and what was generally American about the end of the war. The end of a Second World War that would create the postwar conditions which more generally define our period in this text. Leaving aside many important influences, facts and considerations let us consider the end of the war and the growth of the oil industry as the major defining characteristics of the moment in history at which all of this began. Now we can turn to the historical tradition that defined the Cajun people.

Those who live on the gulf coast today or for other reasons watch a lot of televised or online weather reporting may be familiar with the “cone of uncertainty” that predicts a hurricane’s path from where it is a at any given time to where it may be in ever increasing intervals of time. The end of the cone is wide and it’s scary to be in it but the chances that the worst part of the storm will hit any particular place is not very high in that wide end, On the other hand the end just near the present location of the hurricane is very narrow and there is a lot of certainty about it. Not so many people are likely to be scared but those in that ned are almost sure to be hit by the storm’s fury. In Acadian history this metaphor is more apt than it would be for most places. It is very easy to show the connection of current Cajun culture through history to the coming of Louisiana into the union in with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The nest period is from 1755 to 1803 and it is a complicated period in the extreme. It starts with the exile famously described by the great American Poet William Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic poem Evangeline. Then there is the period in Acadie in what is now Canada and had begun to be Camada when the Cajuns were living there before the exile. For many people that is the totality of Acadian history. However in this chapter we will briefly consider the possibility of Acadian anxiety that exists on the other side of the Atlantic. Finally, we come to the very tenuous and somewhat mythological history of the Acadians before they were French. It is a lot to consider and it will not all be proven either. We are concerned with what existed as a possible historical sensibility of the Cajuns of our historic moment and geographical region. We will at least acknowledge the possibility of all the Cajuns in some earlier form may once have been. But in considering the tradition we do not look away from the people they were in that very exact period of time which we are considering. It is not easy to select out a few aspects of this long and rich tradition to include in a chapter such as this. But something must be provided before any more detailed questions can be really answered about what the documentarians did or did not see and how America correctly or incorrectly sees the Cajuns. It is also true that one wishes to appeal to a reasonably broad readership and not much prior knowledge can be presumed of a reasonably broad readership. For all those reasons before any of the questions of perception that form the heart of this study can receive much attention the story of the people and their place (often referred to here as Acadiana) must be briefly repeated and summarized. This is an attempt at a cultural history and the difficulties of tracing the origins and dating the true beginning of a culture are manifold. With a work of even the most creative history of a nation state if it but meets the duly meticulous standards of Academic political history then it is possible to talk of roots and origins and yet still write with confident authority of a year or perhaps even an instant when the political unit being discussed became fully itself. Such confidence eludes one who attempts the history of a culture. There can never be a single date when the cultural complex which was the civilization of the crumbling Roman Empire’s Western Provinces became the culture and civilization of Medieval European Christendom. Between 476 and 800 A.D. a complex variety of forces was weaving a new reality far more complicated than changing the role and legal prerogatives of the Emperor. “Europe” does not really have a birthday and I am inclined to think any scholar who gives it one more than a little bit of a fool.

the unique problems of doing a history of Acadiana may seem paltry compared to a history of all Europe but they are significant enough and for any particularities they may have they also resemble the problems of cultural history as a whole. The study of culture by anthropologists relies for much of its rhetorical and cognitive structure on the ethnographic efforts at what Clifford Geertz has called “thick descriptions” and upon the efforts of ethologists to translate numerous “thick descriptions”a database for comparative analysis, termed ethnology. The cultural historian must perform some of the same descriptive and comparative tasks as the anthropologist but must also attempt to show change over time and create a narrative or expositive structure which remains true to the muse Clio and her particular demands. This sacred muse demands something beyond the anthropologist’s “ethnographic present.”

Lauren C. Post, professor at San Diego State university, Carl A. Brasseaux and James H. Dorman, a colleague of Brasseaux at U.S.L. and then at the same institution named the university of Louisiana, are three seminal influences on this my own interpretation of Acadian history. Post and Brasseaux’s work shall find its way into endnotes from time to time. Dorman’s work is a separate case in that it primarily finds its place here in this early part of the first real chapter beyond general introductions. Dorman’s The People Called Cajuns: An Introduction to an Ethnohistory has made very good use of Frederick Barth’s work which defines culture not in terms of changeable content but in terms of boundaries. To carry forth Barth’s hypothesis to a clear extreme, among a great many people in the United States and elsewhere Anglo-Saxon cultural identity prevails despite the nearly unbridgeable gap between Graham Greene and Beowulf or between nuclear missiles and woad-smeared warriors the culture persists although over time it has changed a great deal. Such change ought not even to be presumed to weaken the culture. In a great deal of its content the modern life lived in the setting which Princess Catherine visits with nostalgia as Kate Middleton’s hometown may more resemble life in contemporary Japan than in thirteenth century London, yet traditions and customs reinforce loyalties which go back through a people’s history — England really is still England. These analogies are not Dorman’s, nor are they entirely appropriate to the the points he is trying to make and which I am agreeing with so emphatically. The point is that cultural content functions to maintain a sense of shared identity — “we-ness”–and that where such identity exists a culture exists. Culture like all living things can be young or dying or both or neither. Culture must allow for the individual variety among individuals and sub-culture within the whole. The houses one lives in and the food one eats all have a lot to do with one’s cultural identity but the whole is both greater than and distinct from the sum of its parts.

In understanding the emergence of identity it is possible to look at Acadiana and the Acadian ethnic community in two contrasting ways. Perhaps in a very Cajun way I see both the view that Cajuns have something to say about the evolution of the whole country as being a very valid point of view and I also value the point of view that they are unique and somewhat different than the rest of the country or any region in the country. That is not to hold two contradictory opinions but is rather reflective of a larger structure of opinions and understandings of how the United states and societies in general operate and evolve.

I was not born until 1964. Therefore for me all of this period is in fact history outside of my personal set of recollections. But anyone my age cannot help but feel that this is a world much closer to the one we all know. This story ends not with some great conflict or transformation. It simply stops as the world is going on for a pople still caught up in change, still living between the past and the future. So having spent the first part of this conclusory chapter telling how the legacy endured in specific forms I truly end in 1953 remembering what it was like or may have been like at the point when the SONJ projects ended.

C. How That Lifestyle Has Been Remembered: The Evolving Perception and Memory of the Reality behind the Film and the Pictures.

World’s Deepest Oil Well

Brought In At Weeks Island

The world’s deepest oil well was brought in as a producer this week on Weeks Island by the Shell Oil Company, it was learned today.

The Well Smith State No. 3 is the fourth producer brought in by the company on Weeks Island. A fourth well is the Myles Salt Company well.

The well was completed March 27 at a depth of 13,867 13,868 feet officials said…. [32]

The article goes on to tell of other deep wells in the area and how much they are producing. The oil industry was certainly very much on the minds of the people in the region as Louisiana Story was being made. That leaves aside the promise of offshore drilling which was in many ways an outgrowth of Louisiana wetlands drilling. The oil industry did offer a future. The local Cajun community already discussed problems with canal planning and spills but there was a need and a desire to work with the industry. In times where Angels of the Basin and the struggle related to the BP spill and the legacy lawsuits and so many matters come readily to mind for Cajuns and others in Acadiana who view the drilling scenes in the Flaherty film they are not the only things that come to mind Most Cajuns and other residents of this region still want to work with the oil industry for the foreseeable future. Much has changed but that has not changed even for the ones who are most critical of this industry as it currently exists. Only a few would would like to see the heirs of SONJ and Humble go before the resource is fully exploited. The struggles and tensions between the marsh and the drilling rig continue with the images stilll speaking to real lives and communities.

One cannot watch the blowout scene in Louisiana Story without thinking of these events. The perception of events from the more distant past is shaped by images from the more recent past.

My own work on this project began in 1991 and I was not the only person in the area thinking about these topics at that time. Here is an excerpt of other work being done more or less at the same time. Almost no real coordination or communication occurred regarding these things. But the notice following this paragraph appeared in the Abbeville paper when I was researching and writing early drafts of this topic at LSU while earning my Masters degree. In Abbeville the memory of Louisiana Story has endured. It also is featured prominently in Angels of the Basin which is a film which deals with such current crises and coastal erosion and such a recent event as Hurricane Katrina. So there are many reasons why not only film and photography but this film and these photographs have remained highly relevant to current discussions of film and photography. The struggle for a full understanding of Cajun life and identity today must address these images. There is no way to ignore the role in shaping the image and identity of a people and a place without greatly limiting the understanding of how that place and people moved into the world of mass communications through film and photography.

In 1991 Abbeville added a new feature to its local architecture as the Abbey Players acquired their current theater building and set it up for business. It was also the year that I began graduate study in history. It was not long after that that Louisiana Story found its way into my research and their theater in different ways. I use these long cites from the Meridional in English so that readers can form their own ideas of how much and how little this represents a place that is like the places they have studied are different from those places.

Abbeville Meridional June 5 1992

PATRONS NIGHT COORDINATION— Abbeville Fortnightly Club coordinators have teamed up with the Abbey Players to coordinate several wonderful patrons nights for the summer production of “At the Picture Show on Magdalen Square”, a musical to begin here next week. Patrons Nights will be June 17 and 18 and a jazz brunch on June 21 Fortnightly members Susie Bertrand and Tracy Russo met with Abbey Players Deborah Atchetee and Marie Vaughan Regular performances begin June 19 Tickets are available at The Apple Tree in Abbeville, Raccoon Records and Video in Lafayette

Take a nostalgic trip back to Abbeville in the 1940s and come to the Abbey Players for their original musical “ At the Picture Show on Magdalen Square” it written and directed by F. Wade Russo, an Abbevillian now living in New York. Patrons’ Nights are on Friday June 17th, Saturday June 18th, and a Jazz Brunch noon on Sunday, June 19th.. For information call 893-2442. Regular performances begin June 19th for a limited run, with’ performances every Wednesday through Sunday through July 4th. Tickets are available at The Apple Tree in Abbeville, Raccoon Records in Lafayette and Verna’s Hallmark in New Iberia. The Abbey Players in happy to announce that, starting now, there will be reserved seating for all shows (Patron’s night excluded). Get your tickets early for this limited run musical. See you at “The Picture Show”.

The truth is that the writer F. Wade Russo has had the kind of stellar career at places like Juliard and the Boston Conservatory. He had left behind life in Acadiana and was proud of his Sicilian heritage in Cajun Country. Nonetheless, he celebrates his heritage in the region as well. In addition he certainly had many Cajun friends growing up and the established Sicilian community in Vermilion Parish has many ties by blood and marriage to the Acadian ethnic community. But still, the Cajun connection to the work is a complicated one at least. My own connection to this community is not without complications and it is in fact a complicated community. Brasseaux’s book Acadiana[33] cites the judgement of other scholars and the direct evidence presented in his book to show the great cultural complexity of the place and its peoples. Only a small glimpse of that aspect of Acadiana’s identity and essence has been presented here. It also deserves to be said that Louisiana Story is not like Evangeline it does not have the same towering respect and also pervasive influence that poem has had in the culture. But Wade Russo’s musical revue was certainly a sign that the movie had become part of the local cultural scene in many ways. Some of the material taken from the 1992 press related to the production will show how it lived again in the popular consciousness:

Abbey Players Theatre will open its doors this evening for the first production of the original musical ‘At the Picture Show on Magdalen Square.’ In honor of the special occasion, Abbeville Mayor Brady Broussard has proclaimed Friday, June 19. as ‘At the Picture Show on Magdalen Square’ Day here. Written and directed by Abbeville native (Staff photo {of Russo included here} by Angie Hebert) Wade Russo. the musical is based on the premier of the 1940’s movie, ‘The Louisiana Story’ — but with a local twist.[34]

To have a day proclaimed for it is far more than is typical for events in the Parish or this small city. The interest in the return of the successful Russo to his native roots is likely one of the reasons Abbeville got behind this celebration. The article continues:

. To read these names brings back precious memories of the gala premiere of the ‘Louisiana Story* at Frank’s Theatre and the good old days. Residents and businesses are remembered in scenes throughout the production; including the late Donald Frederick who lost his life when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Abbeville paid respect to Frederick by naming a boulevard in his honor As the musical says, from the church on the square to the Audrey Hotel and the smell of the syrup mill, Abbeville is where our hearts belong.[35]

The cohesion of the community goes back to the way the film was dealt with by the paper and others at the time and does not seem to have diminished. The names in this list are left in place partly so that the reader can remember seeing some family names earlier in the text and also be fairly sure of not having seen others. The original production in 1992 was about as big a dramatic and musical experience as Abbeville has ever seen. Few can equal or surpass it in a town that does have a good bit of music and drama. This is just an affirmation that this film has remained highly relevant to the way in which people of this region and locale currently define and identify themselves.

Eight years after the rather extensive support that the original production of the Wade Russo work had received Abbeville celebrated the sesquicentennial of its founding ( that’s right 1850 after saying it is rooted in the 1840’s but the founding was based on act act late in the total process of founding — its incorporation — most of the work was done in the 1840s). Mayor Brady Broussard chose Russo’s musical revue as the centerpiece of the celebration and it was largely billed as a celebration of life in Abbeville in the 1940s. That may be fair enough but I think we have seen that the premiere was by no means a typical day and the issues and interests it brought to the fore were by no means limited to Abbeville. Louisiana Story has remained however part of the consciousness of this city and a mayor named Broussard could appreciate that reality.

One of the reasons that Dudley Leblanc features prominently in this paper is because is because of the rather complicated relationship I believe that he has to the evolution of the screenplay. The second reason is because of his connection to the region, people and newspapers. The third reason is because of his writing about the past in the first point sense as regards my outline.

The rather cumbersome and lengthy title of this paper indicates the importance of both Acadiana and the Standard Oil of New Jersey Documentary Projects. The purpose here is not to examine either reality without reference to the other. The purpose is to examine the reality of both without forgetting that they are each distinct and large realities that have in fact influenced one another but that either reality could exist without the other. However, the actual works produced about Acadiana from individual still shots, to collections called stories to short films like Pirogue Maker[36] by Arnold Eagle and on into the great film Louisiana Story, those things could not exist without Acadiana and the Cajun community.

The pictures and the film funded by Standard Oil tell a story and one important question is whether it is to any degree the story they came to tell is a true story. Whether the story they did tell was in any way a true story. My undergraduate studies were heavy in literature and I have a high regard for the truth of fiction itself. But fiction is not the same kind of truth as sportswriting for example which I have sometimes done for a living. This study takes a look at the degree to which this group of skilled observers and communicators did communicate fact and create historical documents or sources. We have already examined that question a bit from the point of view of the subjects themselves, the question perhaps is not so simple in resolution as some might assume that it would be. However, all though not directly exhausting the subject or even doing it justice the study has made clear the evidence sufficient to show that the Cajuns were not a pristine culture. The Cajuns were not pristine in their contact with the New England environment. They had fought with New England Yankees in every war since the Civil War and against them in the Civil War. They had played a unique if debatable role in the War of 1812 and the American Revolution. None of these qualities were true of Flaherty’s Samoans, Inuit clans or people of the Irish outer islands. Although of course with the rural Irish there are greater similarities. These are Flaherty’s connections of course. The people of the SONJ project coming together mostly from the FSA experience are more oriented to see the Cajuns as rural Americans and that is generally these sense one gets in the difference between the two groups of images. The SONJ pictures had they formed a movie would have captured more of the Acadian experience of moving into the mainstream. That was of course a major theme in Flaherty’s film as well. So we still in a recent book have New York’s elite discussing the primitive Acadians. That theme of misunderstanding is a very old one. But the truth is that New England is in general perpetually born unaware of its connection with the Acadian experience. This is true even though the New Englanders and Acadians of this region have fought on the same side in most wars since the Revolutionary War or War for American Independence.

But the people being photographed had an even older relationship with New England than the Revolutionary era of course. Pierre Maisonnat had been a scourge of New England shipping long ago. One might wonder to what degree the struggle between Acadians and Yankees continued in yet another century in the propaganda value of selection of decidedly backwards subjects to shoot compared to the most forward thinking or looking subjects. Lafayette, Louisiana was not Boston no matter what but neither was it the La Tour cabin. Perhaps some of the people they shot with cameras may have descended from Maisonnat or his men born in Acadia who fired cannon at New England ships or they may have descnded from some other Acadian privateer under the French standard. Less than perfect relations between the regions and peoples of Acadian and Yankee designation is an American story too little told and studied, Pierre Maisonnat dit Baptiste was born in Bergerac, France in 1663 in the larger region of Western France which besides Bergerac included La Rochelle and Poitiers from which most Acadian colonists came. Flaherty and Webb had not grown up hating Maisonnat but that is not the only way a tradition of hostility can find its way into subsequent traditions. So whether it seems fair or not this study will not presume goodwill was an essential part of whatever perspective distinguished these documentarians. The relationship between New Englanders and Acadians was not all hostile and negative. One chapter in Brasseaux’s Founding of the New Acadia[37] is devoted to tracking the positive aspects of the relations between what amounted to neighboring communities. Those good relations between wars included trade, personal friendship and varied forms of what amounted to political and diplomatic cooperation. But the point of all this is that in no way whatsoever was this a pristine culture in the sense that Flaherty was recording either an aboriginal culture which had been in this place since before the start of the historical record nor was this in any way a culture which had never been observed by the people who most defined the basic culture of New York and the North Eastern Seaboard of the United States. There is a third way in which the Cajuns might be a pristine culture for Flaherty. They could be pristine in the way that they faced the natural environment without the support of a larger outside society before the coming of the oil industry. In the chapters so far it has been shown that the most rural Cajuns participated in a cash economy, were connected to many institutions in towns and communities and in many other ways were not pristine. But it is also true that while a trapper might buy all his traps he respected the trapper who could make his own if he needed to and maybe ran one or two handmade traps. The trapper’s wife might buy most of her vegetables but still respected the trapper’s wife who had a garden, chickens,ducks, turtles and a few fruit trees within the distance a woman could walk carrying a baby. That was still an admired accomplishment. The average trapper might not live a pristine lifestyle at all in this last since but perhaps had rags and patches of pure subsistence capabilities and a view that those trappers would prosper most who made their money in the larger market and kept most of it by producing a great deal themselves when no trapping would or could occur. The SONJ photographers certainly captured many images of these varied kinds of economic activities near the home which were often either directly in support of the man’s work far from home or were undertaken by women. In addition to subsistence, women could generate cash income from excess eggs, chickens and produce. This could be even more important to farmers and cattlemen than to trappers although the farmers and trappers usually had more money and wealth. The farmers and cattlemen only got paid a few times each year in many cases and these small sales provided cash flow to the families which could make a large difference in the survival of the farm or ranch. So generally, there was no pristine culture to record by any real meaning of the word.

It is important to realize how much Acadiana had been defined and how deep Acadian roots were before the Second World War. That is especially true in a presentation given during the Obama administration. There were deep and powerful traditions shaping identity that neither the Second World War nor the Post War period could be likely to alter very much. A tiny glimpse into that history is permissible here despite the limitation of space and presentation time.

This writer has read and researched thoroughly a great deal about the Acadian people of most of half a century and all of that forms a sort of comprehensive cross reference which is yet subordinated another much smaller body of research either cited or at least catalogued here. This thesis seeks use all of that research to evaluate that evidence appearing in the documentaries funded by Standard Oil of New Jersey in these years.Whatever innocence Robert Flaherty may have been famous for it was not contagious to the SONJ photographers or to Roy Stryker. We will leave most questions of method to Chapter Four but a few things must be said here to show why a scholar should at least presume to take the documentary work of the SONJ photographers seriously.

Throughout the letters of Todd Webb and the Rosskams one finds reference to interviews with local informants and with experts. There are references to discussing local history with journalists and professors associated with Louisiana State University and also with Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now University of Southwestern Louisiana or USL) . Photographic sets were made from fairly objective samples taken by floating down the Bayous. Bayou Teche and Bayou Piere Part were especially well documented. From the worf of the Stryker photographers a blend of subjective creativity with social science emerges. Their picture of Louisiana folklife can be correlated with other sources of information. The historian can then produce a more complete vision of the past than might be possible without using the largely honest and truthful if not necessarily unbiased photographs. FOr one’s biases do not make one dishonest. The overall effort was in may carefully formed opinion an effort to tell the truth. There is another question not so easily be answered. Does a skilled artist produce the kind of information that most interest a cultural historian studying that subject which the artist is also studying? From that question derives another question, don’t the artist and the cultural historian perceive and wish to perceive and present something very different from one another?

While in this text I clearly pay more attention to the photographers as subjects themselves than I do to most journalists writing strict reportage the gap is not infinite. I believe that they photographed the Cajuns in Cajun country and that is what the reader is invited to believe as well. Vastly more attention is paid to the photographers as minds than another scholar might pay to census takers and rightly so — BUT, the photographers are secondary to the attempt to use their work in order to write about the subject both of the photographs and the thesis. That subject is the Cajuns and at the same time how the Cajuns were perceived by the larger society in the United States especially,

The history of the region can not subsist only in a few sources but rather in a large number of diverse sources and in fact the need for perspective has led this writer to discuss remote events which make the photographs and other documentary sources intelligible. The photographs will mean little to anyone who approaches them without knowing that the people of South Louisiana have a history very distinct from the people of central Mississippi, western Virginia, or the hill country of South Carolina. In other words while deeply identified with the Confederate Ordeal of the Civil War and all the periods flowing from it that never became as important an identifiers. Beyond that they had many differences between themselves and others in the region. These differences were deeply in a distinct historical experience. A cursory summary of that experience is necessary to continue to speak of the Cajun people and to mean anything intelligible.

From approximately 1604 until approximately 1640 a widely scattered population of French colonists developed in the first Acadia, which is now known as Nova Scotia in Canada. These colonists suffered all of the handicaps of a scattered and ill organized population in a new place. By about 1640, a relatively large increase in immigration from Centre-Ouest provinces and from Normandy began to settle in Acadia and to build farms and villages. They began to build levees and to construct a hydraulic system which allowed them to manage this area which was very susceptible to floods. A distinctive French colonial community had begun to develop along with a modicum of prosperity and the steady growth of the population. Politically however, this community was soon to become a minority culture in the control of aliens. How can something that far back matter to this paper? Many might ask this question legitimately enough. But the whole history of Acadians is one of both preserving identity and evolving it. In addition I believe it to be very relevant both to federal theories and practice of American government and to the life we must all share as Americans who see a country marked by tensions between Americans who identify as such and also have other identities.

By the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the 2,000 or more Acadians along the Bay of Fundee became officially British subjects. While this was the first of many terrible political disappointments which would shape the history of these people it does not seem to have quashed the optimism of these people for their young colony.[38] Tension with the British, and continued immigration from La Chausec, Poitous, France indicate the relative confidence of the people and their desire to control their own destiny. This ambiguous state of affairs continued until the sporadic violence of the past developed into the war known to American schoolchildren as the French and Indian War. The undeclared agreement of most Cajuns, maritime Acadians and scholars is that during the violence between 1753 and 1755 the Acadian culture became something truly distinct from French or even French Canadian culture. By 1755, the population of Acadia had approached 15,000. The British authorities coerced as many Acadians as possible into ships and scattered 6,000 of these people among the British colonies of the New World. Many of those scattered were refused entry into the colonies and died attempting to reach France and Santo Domingo. Numerous others did in fact arrive at both their ancestral homeland and at the West Indian colony. A number of others settled amongst the colonies which would become the United States. In Acadia, Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil commanded and organized a sizable resistance which, in league with some Indians and with the sympathy of all Acadians who had been able to remain on their own or other farms, maintained intermittent military pressure on the British until his surrender in 1759, after the fall of Quebec. Today, anyone can go to Nova Scotia and visit the Grand Pre historic Site. The development of this as a place of tourism and pilgrimage especially for Cajuns without excluding other people from what it has to offer. Eighteenth Century Grand Pre was an economically and otherwise significant small town in the colony of Acadie through several changes in the politics and Imperial organization of the region.. Today there is a statue of Evangeline the Acadian heroine of Longfellow’s epic poem [39]. There is also chapel reproducing the one where Acadians were imprisoned prior to expulsion. There are murals, engraved names and other aspects of the memorial preserve some of the events of Le Grand Derangement. I have made a pilgrimage there with some family members and friends as many Louisiana Acadians do and the spot was visited by Dudley Leblanc during the years after this study and others although the changes in the presentation and form of the place is a question beyond that of this thesis In recent years a decent number of scholars have turned their attention to the Acadian experience before and during the expulsion but for a good treatment of the colonial era I think that there is no substitute for the brief and highly readable book by Naomi Griffiths. One fact which needs to emerge and that is that clearly the Acadians who held to this Acadian identity were people who had clung to a heritage in which small towns and the farms, countryside and surrounding wilderness could be important places. The documentarians who worked for Standard Oil had a definite center of their community and it was New York City. The countryside of Nova Scotia was a place few of them had visited but was a part of the consciousness of all Cajuns.

The troubles of the Acadian people and their enormous productivity and the horror of their loss has been well documented by John Mack Faragher in his book, A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland[40]. It is important for the reader to understand that just as moral outrage is at the heart of many historical texts about the institution of slavery, women’s civil status and the Third Reich this writer also believes that British behavior towards the Acadians in this period was a moral outrage. But it is not enough to say that it was a moral outrage. British behavior was perhaps mostly motivated by greed but the complexities of the time were greater than that single set of motivations that derive from greed for the beautifully developed dykelands and associated territories of the Acadians.

The resentments of the British towards the Acadians had been marked by many instances of bloodshed. The Acadians had developed many aspects of the martial reputation which would most often typify them over those centuries which are most clearly traceable in their history, The British would use the claim or pretext of treaty violations at the Battle of Beausejour in justifying their expulsion of the Acadians. The Acadians had become known as the French Neutrals through the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. Really this was a process of several minor agreements subsequent to this larger treaty. The Acadians diligently provided large agricultural surplus to the British, as a community they promoted peace between the Empires and as an asset to the British Empire they cultivated a peaceful prosperity in a secure and stable set of relationships with the MiqMaqs. But they remained Roman Catholics, insisted on their rights to trade with the French and were never in doubt that they had long fought against the British Empire. As required they greatly reduced their arms but they continued to drill their local militia units to a substantial degree without any flag they could fight for in a major war. The British had agreed that they not be compelled to fight against their fellow French. Finally the time came when one more British victory would end the French presence in their region. That Battle of Beausejour would certainly end their chance to survive as a buffer between empires if the British won. This battle was a British victory during a time of many triumphs over France and the French. The British had a major objective in a small conflict seeking to secure the Isthmus of Chignecto under British control. Control of the isthmus was crucial to the French and its fall would be disastrous because it was the only gateway between Quebec and Louisbourg during the winter months. Acadians were already neutrals although less than before but believed securing the Isthmus in peace was vital to their future and a token force were in the area and were caught up in the conflict. The fighting began on June 3, 1755, when a British army under Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Monckton acted on long discussed plans made across the British Empire but staged out of nearby Fort Lawrence, and attacked French, MiqMaq, Acadian and other interests by attacking a fort of emerging significance when he besieged the small French regular garrison and a handful of other forces at Fort Beauséjour. After a fortnight under siege, Louis Du Pont Duchambon de Vergor, the fort’s French commander, capitulated on June 16. It was this disastrous defeat at Beausejour that sealed the fate of the Acadians This fighting became an infamous treaty breach in some circles and the Battle of Beausejour was a causis bellum and provided a workable legal issue for the expulsion planners among the British. One of the combatants in that battle accompanied by a few picked men was a man known as Joseph Broussard “dit Beausoleil. “Beausoleil” means “beautiful sunlight” it is also the name of a village in Acadie where several families including the Broussards from which Joseph lived. Those are the accepted explanations of the identifying handle of Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil or “called Beausoleil”.However at the level of the mermaids and werewolves at the start of Louisiana Story there is a somewhat whispered and denied tradition that Beausoleil is also a code name for Basileus which means king in Greek. The currency of the name remains might in Cajun culture at the time of this writing. That is true both of the Broussard family’s name and the handle Beausoleil is also the name of a band led by Michael Doucet which has been a successful part of the ethnic music scene for decades.

Shortly after the battle of Beausejour the horrors of the expulsion and exile began. Joseph Broussard and a number of men with the Broussard and a few other clans escaped deportation and organized disgruntled bands of MiqMaqs and attacked British forces for quite a while. Some argue that there is a tradition of twelve raids by bands led by Broussard. His son Amand who would fight in the Battle of Baton Rouge was said to have led a small squad when he was very young indeed. But in the end the Broussard led force would surrender. That first great scattering by the British forces in which so many died and so many others separated has become the central event of Cajun history and literary tradition and is known as Le Grand Derangement. These troubles also led in many ways and to a controverted extent to the creation of the forces which brought about the American Revolution. This has been written as well by Douglas Edward Leach as by anybody else in his book, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677-1763[41].

The period between 1754 and 1765 saw a great deal of suffering and a struggle for security among the scattered Acadians. During that period it is likely that at least a few of those driven from their homes made their way in small groups on an inland route into Louisiana down the Mississippi River and into the French colony of Louisiana. Many died in the Chesapeake area and others were subjected to near slavery. During the 1760’s nearly 3,000 went to Santo Domingo and among them Beausoleil Broussard, at the lowest point in his career. Troubled politics still plagued the Acadians, rebellions and revolutions successful and otherwise would strike New Orleans, the Thirteen British colonies, Santo Domingo, and France itself before the end of the century and either the revolutions of the preparations for them would affect the lives of most of these Acadian refugees and immigrants, perhaps heightening their desire to carve out a place for themselves to reunite their people and to live in peace.

In 1763, early in the scattering, the Treaty of Paris gave possession of Louisiana to Spain. It was into Spanish Louisiana that the first large and well organized Acadian immigrants came. Beausoleil brought approximately 4,000 Acadians into the territory once occupied by the Attakapas Indians. Attakapas country consists of the present Louisiana parishes of St. Martin, St. Mary, Lafayette, Iberia, and Vermilion. This region combing marsh and prairie was the first area developed into a new Acadia. The population of Attakapas spread into the prairies to the West. Those western prairies were known as the Opelousas country and extended to the present border of Texas. The successful establishment of the Acadianos in these two regions attracted the attention of their remaining relatives and allies. In 1785, Olivier Theriot brought another large group of approximately 3,000 Acadian refugees and others associated with them from France. These Acadians settled along the Bayou LaFourche then known as “La Fourche des Chetimaches” after the aboriginal inhabitants of the area. La Fourche and its environs, nearer New Orleans and composed almost entirely of elongated riverine villages, developed a somewhat different way of life than the “prairie Cajuns.” The inhabitants of Bayou La Fourche are sometimes referred to as “bayou Cajuns.” The Attakapas and Opelousas area make up the heel of the boot which is the foot of Louisiana and the La Fourche region forms the ball of the boot. The instep or arch, to sustain the visual metaphor, consisted of a vast swamp only lightly used by Chitimacha Indians known as the Atchafalaya Swamp. This region was settled partly by a few adventurous families from the Attakapas region during the late eighteenth century and more significantly by Acadians from La Fourche who sold their earlier farms to American slaveholders during the early decades of the nineteenth century after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The swamp, the ecosystem where Louisiana Story is set has always existed on the edge of Cajun residency, development and identity. Kathleen Duval in her book Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution[42] describes the life of one of Joseph Broussard’s sons Amand during the American revolution. One fact which this book brings out is the importance of cattle for the Acadians in Spanish Louisiana. Le Grand Derangement has had an impact so powerful that despite the acculturation of later immigrants to the Acadiana areas of settlement during the nineteenth century this tends to define Cajun identity. Trent Angers’ book as well as countless periodicals attest to the popular perception in the area of how the people were formed in crisis and the exiled migrations that began in Acadie and ended in Acadiana. Furthermore, while Longfellow’s Evangeline may not hold sway in the literary canon of the late twentieth century it did influence other Americans’ understanding of the Cajuns for a long time. In reality the migrations were enormous within the context of North American colonial migrations of time and they did have a deep impact upon the descendants of the migrants. the upheaval also affected the world over the next many years.

Joseph Broussard was not to survive his arrival in Louisiana by very long. But there is an online article by Donald J. Arceneaux of the Attakapas Historical Association[43] which does a good job of summarizing the less controversial aspects of his life and role in Louisiana. I will quote this article at great length once and save space over most alternatives. But first it is useful to spend a few lines on the term Attakapas which applies to the region where the Louisiana Story was filmed. The Terre des Atakapas is named for the Attakapas an aboriginal American tribe known for small numbers, ferocity and cannibalism who were very diminished in wars with other aboriginal American nations, the Spanish and the French before the Acadians under Joseph Broussard came to this region. The Prairie where Abbeville and Lafayette sit is the Attakapas country in Acadian and Louisiana parlance and folklore and also in the realm of folklore and semi historical rumor it is believed that a good number of Atakapas (or Attakapas or Atakkapas) were killed in skirmishes and their wives and children taken as mistresses and second families by the Acadians. Some of their descendants joined the Houma who also interbred and intermarried heavily with the Acadians. The Attakapas name was so hated by neighbors that only people who are almost pure European White have ever dared to use it since first contact. There are remnants but no tribe. The remnants are spread over a large area.

Before the region was settled there was an experience and set of events in New Orleans that are significant. As Arceneaux points out, the Acadians arrived in New Orleans and engaged in the fulfillment of many religious duties and transactions at the Catholic Church there. they also tended to financial transactions involving problems with currency exchange. Later in this introduction in conjunction with the events of the 1880s the importance and the names of some of the women in these events will be revisited. This is considered by most Cajuns to be the start of the large scale cattle industry in the United States. Then Arceneaux describes as well as anyone what happened next.

The Acadians had the experience raising crops and cattle in their old, north-temperate-climate homeland. A contingent of the Beausoleil group consisted of former residents of the Isthmus of Chignecto region, where profitable Acadian cattle ranching had been well established for decades. After only about a week in New Orleans, the new immigrants were apparently offered land in the far western Attakapas frontier. Frenchmen Antoine-Bernard Dauterive and André Masse were Attakapas land partners. On 2 March 1765 in the City, the partners relinquished title to their frontier land, presumed to have been along Bayou Teche in the vicinity of present-day St. Martinville. In exchange for this ceded tract, the partners were given a large expanse of land named La Prairie du Vermilion located well west of St. Martinville. It is written that the Acadians were to settle specifically on the partners’ ceded east-bank land opposite St. Martinville. It is also reported that the partners’ relinquished land extended from the east-bank all the way to the mouth of Bayou Portage. Dauterive had cattle in the Attakapas. On 4 April in New Orleans, he made a compact with eight Acadian “chiefs” including: Joseph dit Beausoleil Broussard, Alexandre Broussard, Joseph Guilbeau, Jean Dugas, Olivier Thibodeau, Jean-Baptiste Broussard, Pierre Arseneau and Victor Broussard. These eight leaders were possibly also acting for their comrades not present at the formal meeting attended by the governor. Dauterive agreed to furnish five cows and one bull to each willing Acadian, once the newcomers were on the western frontier. After six years, Dauterive would get half their herd’s increases. From their shares, the Acadians would also return to Dauterive his initial investments.

On 8 April in New Orleans, the governor gave Joseph Broussard a title and a responsibility. Beausoleil was named “Captain of Militia and Commandant of the Acadians going to settle on the land of the Acutapas [sic].” The governor reported on 24 April 1765 that the Beausoleil group had “departed New Orleans.” They traveled in boats with supplies bound for their new sub-tropical homeland. On that same date, possibly somewhere along the Mississippi River near present-day Plaquemine, the pastor at St. Francis Church of Pointe Coupée baptized one-day old Marguerite Broussard, daughter of Joseph [Petit Joseph] and his second wife, Marguerite Savoie. These parents were recorded as “Acadians going to establish a new settlement at Attakapas.”[44]

Cajuns in the prairies are separated from the City of New Orleans and the Acadian settlements of the Eastern part of the state by one of the largest riverine estuaries in North America. This is probably still the largest riverine estuary and it is where swamp life occurs most. Marshes are more common in the trapping culture of the prairies although swamps occur. Louisiana story depicts a swamp which is a forested wetlands the marshes are prairie like wetlands. Both environments have fur-bearing animals and alligators. The Atchafalaya was the traditional Aboriginal American territory of the Chitimacha or Chetimache people. In the decades since the 1953 end of the years this text discusses this swamp produces a great deal of the crawfish, fur, alligator meat, fresh water fish, retting moss, sunken cured cypress, ecotourism revenues and freshwater sports fishing revenues for the State of Louisiana. It is the place where many of the most important Aboriginal American archaeological sites have been found. The area is sacred to the Chetimache traditional religion and retains a sacral character among Chitimacha, Acadian and Creoles of Color who within the context of an orthodox Catholic Christianity inculturate the Gospel into folk religious sensibilities. But in day to day life one reality is that swamp life is also very much a cash driven existence. It has long been a mix of subsistence and cash funding which is suited to the region. But there is also a sense of how much the place is beyond normal modern life. that sense of separation is not available in the same way in any of the wilderness of Vermilion and Iberia Parish.

The generation born to Joseph Broussard and others is largely a generation not born either in their Canadian homeland nor in Louisiana. Men like Amand broussard and his wife, some of his brothers and others fought in the Battle of Baton Rouge was a brief siege and attack by the Spanish Colonial forces and regulars against the British.during the American Revolutionary War and War of Independence in which the Acadians made up part of the St. Martinville militia and were busy forging ties with Creoles and Spaniards against the British Empire. that was decided on September 21, 1779. The Acadians were still arriving over a period of time and a large group would not arrive until 1785 but they were committed to Galvez’s war. Baton Rouge was the second British outpost in which they saw action which fell to Spanish arms during Governor and General Bernardo de Gálvez’s march into British West Florida. Spain and its empire officially entered the American Revolutionary War on May 8, 1779, as Su Majestad Catolico Carlos III issued a formal declaration of war and another on July 8 that authorized Bernardo de Gálvez, the colonial Governor of Spanish Louisiana and other in the Empire to open lines in this war on Britain. West Florida which would become part of the State of Louisiana later on was thus conquered in small part by the Acadians along with others who were in the Spanish Empire’s Louisiana. With the coming together of the Attakapas region and the West Florida region there is a foreshadowing of the polity that will one day be the State of Louisiana. So there is no real concept of Louisiana or the United States in my view which is not tied up in Acadian history. The conversation here is about the reemergence of an old identity.
This paper is put together in a rush from a project that has probably gone on longer than any book project should. Last year Zachary Richard who is interested in many of these same issues which interest me won a prestigious award which recognized his long labors in this field. I owe my opportunity to address this association as far as I know to two contacts from my own studies at the Louisiana State University History Department but I applied and did not get in there last year who know if there would be a more positive tone in this paper if I had gotten in. But really this is such a brief and edited version of the paper leaving out so much of the dark side that any brighter tone is one other than than I really want to set. Film and photography are a particularly important part of the struggle for preserving the culture, language and identity of the Cajun people. In 2016, as I was on the waiting list for admission to Louisiana State University’s Doctoral Program in History, Zachary Richard was named Humanist of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. And his work as a musician, poet and songwriter have been enormously impressive. However, he has always been connected with and aware of the camera and its role in communication, in communicating environmental concerns and making people aware of any aspect of cultural development and structure. Film and photography form a set of focal points in many of our lives. Itis possible to argue a whole set of facts about Louisiana’s connection to Cajuns and Cajuns connections to Louisiana. A great deal of it comes down to what is good and bad. Also one can discuss what is right and wrong. I am quite comfortable with such discussions but they are not the subject of this paper. In addition this paper has not mentioned before this sentence the evolution that occurred from the original Flaherty screenplay presented to Standard Oil and titled “The Christmas Tree” and the classic film known as Louisiana Story. It is that transformation which justifies the most interesting aspects of my study of Dudley Leblanc. In this paper it is a bit less clear why he matters so much. But I return your attention to a complex interplay of relationships. The relationships between all aspects of this study are both loose and complicated. But what is not unclear to me is that Acadians were reawakened into American identity and that happened in this time period of the SONJ projects and we can learn something about those changes from the right study of those projects.

The SONJ photography project supervised by Roy Stryker ended completely somewhere else and the occasion was not much noticed in Acadiana. The previous decade had carried the world from the greatness, horror and weighty contests of the Second World War to something else. The something else was a period of emerging American prosperity. It was a period of urbanization. For the first time the US Census of 1950 showed that more residents of Louisiana lived in cities than outside of them. The period of this study began when the Louisiana Maneuvers were the largest training drill in U.S. Army history. By 1953 despite the heroic action of some Cajuns and some of their neighbors in the Korean War and the pervasive influence of the Cold War with the Soviet Union on society Louisiana had the character of a region long at peace in the eyes of many people. Compared to the wars on their own soil and the mass mobilizations of World War II the role of the military in the state was greatly reduced. For Cajuns the early 1950s were a time of uncertainty. The region itself was changing. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the new President of the United States and although few could imagine all it might mean people were starting to talk of a system of highways that would change rural America like never before. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet was promoted in the 1950s was to help rectify the limits of the Industrial Canal and other features of New Orleans shipping to help it compete with the rest of the world in a changing era of navigation, bigger ships need different kinds of canals. By 1953 many rural Cajuns had already noticed problems with natural drainage disruptions on a smaller scale as oil companies changed waterways to allow deeper draft vessels to work in many location and then abandoned the canals as improvements without any real plan or inventory. A few were already concerned about the effects of some plans to correct Louisiana’s deep draft deficiency by permitting deep-draft vessels to access the Industrial Canal inner harbor in a new feature. But the kind of very distinctive rural and wetlands Cajuns who most discussed these things tended to have a fading influence and little voice to speak of in those years. In addition Cajuns had built many miles of levees and canals for centuries and were hopeful that the emerging national power would make good choices. There was no organized Cajun resistance to the authorization for the MRGO was formally provided by the United States Congress in the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1956. The world had begun to rely on fewer people per ton to crew a ship or a boat, produce an acre of crops and local militia duty in small boats and infantry units was more or less fading into the past. Chris Park in his book Sacred Worlds: An Introduction to Geography and Religion states that Roman Catholic religious affiliation has been in decline among Cajuns since 1945. He also the extremely important role that Roman Catholicism played in maintaining a distinct identity for French Louisiana throughout its history within the largely Protestant and Anglicized United States of America.

The forces that would make the coming years had not yet fully matured but for those most aware of the limits of the new era there was no doubt that powerful forces were reshaping America. It was a time of anxiety about the nuclear war.The Soviet Union had by then detonated a nuclear weapon and begun building more and the Cold War had begun in earnest. In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were first United States Citizens who were both civilians and executed for treason by their government. The world clearly faced new dangers that were unfamiliar to the long and complex heritage with which they associated themselves. Mostly the Cajuns were at peace and in prosperity as they lived out their lives. For them, as for most Americans the Korean War was a far away thing following a terrible war with Japan and hopefully part of avoiding an even more terrible war with China and Russia. For Whitney Adam Leblanc of Iberia Parish and some other Cajun soldiers it was a struggle nightmarish violence in which they fought two actions known together as the Battle of Pork Chop Hill in 1953. For them the year was spectacularly violent. But there would be nobody to meet Whitney Leblanc at the bus stop when he got home. The Korean war was a war mostly of individual Cajuns and individual Cajun families in the smaller sense of the word. These people felt at once very Cajun and very American but the two identities had little connection in this experience. For the purposes of this book the Korean War is fairly or unfairly largely ignored. It has often been largely ignored in recountings of the period as it was perceived by Americans at home. One cannot help but note that the war was fought far from any Cajun or Acadian homeland, neither the enemies nor the allies spoke much French and the nature of the struggle was poorly understood across many sectors of American society. The contrast between the experience of being involved in the fighting and being left behind was even greater than is normal in the long history of war.

It is hard to say how much the Louisiana Story and the SONJ photographs were viewed, discussed and remembered but clearly they were already objects of nostalgia. Already the vision of their world before the growth of the oil industry was seeming like something tied to a distant past. The world that children learned about in school and the world that was reported in the media was most a world that seemed likely to share values that were continuous with those of their past. Increasingly there was a specialization of cultural functions within the community. People who identified themselves as Cajuns were more than ready to support those who preserved cultural expressions and traditions to some extent. However, the sense of continuity of communal interdependence which relied on culturally distinct institutions was in decline. Language, religion, the basic components of the economy and many other aspects of life were in a real sense changing in the face of a world that was less amenable to preserving their distinct identity than ever before. This has not been and will not now become a comparative history text. However, other rural communities and other minority groups were becoming aware of a rapidly changing world as well.Louisiana Story had been released again as Cajun the year before this final year of the SONJ project and the tone of its distribution was less respectful than previously. the Stryker project for Standard Oil was ending and it was not much noticed. America was moving into the period that was recognizably the 1950s and in many Cajun towns and villages there was a strong effort to go with the flow of the new American consensus. Cajuns were generally proud to be Americans and were also wondering as individuals and in groups of different sizes and types exactly how American they were welcome to be. Some Cajuns were fighting in Korea under the American flag and a few had already returned from action in that war. Those who had known or cared a great deal about Flaherty and were interested in movies noted that Flaherty had been credited as one of the directors on a final Academy Award winning Documentary about Michelangelo called Titan. That laurel earned in 1950 would be one of his last, by 1953 had been dead for more than a year. He had died in Vermont and Louisiana seemed to be just one of many places where he had spent some time.

Film editor Helen Van Dongen was still alive when I began writing this thesis and I had begun the process of contacting her but never did. Since that time she has published a diary of her experience on the project and that diary has formed a valuable counterpoint and compliment to other points of view and observations throughout this book. She seems to have gone from Flaherty’s company to restore the long and complex relationship with Joris Ivers after Louisiana Story. She was certainly at least relatively young and vigorous in 1953 Forty-four years old and near the end of a career in film that had begun back in her native Netherlands when she was in her teens. Born overseas in Amsterdam, Netherlands she did one last film after Louisiana Story. A film to commemorate the Universal Declaration of Human rights was a work she produced edited and directed. She married a pro-Soviet US Journalist named Kenneth Durant and all three of them were in Vermont when Robert J. Flaherty died. It is hard to be sure what she was thinking about her stay in Cajun country in 1953. But she was in another part of rural America. She had edited Flaherty’s work The Land produced or commissioned by Pare Lorentz and so with her time in Cajun country and her long final stay in Vermont her commitment to rural American life was really very substantial. Her life was also deeply shaped by the experience of the Cold War in her marriage to her husband. But one has to presume that she left Louisiana and the Cajun mostly in the realm of memory. Not interviewing her is one of those missed opportunities for which there can be no substitute.

Cultural history to be truly all it can be still seems to me to need to embrace the historical truth of all those in the subject study. Here Documentarians, Cajuns and the oil industry all have something to say to us. Whitney Allan Leblanc coming home with nobody to meet him from his terrible battle at Pork Chop Hill, Leblanc selling HADACOL and having it go bankrupt because he feared investigations by the FDA — but not because he thought they were right. These were just a few signs that history had not stopped and the era is not all the stuff of nostalgia. I began this project with more personal optimism in 1991 than I am ever likely to have again. But I am glad to have a chance to put some of it out to be read. My life is in many ways much too much of a failure to end this essay as it should end. I should be able to write of the hopes of the region and its peoples and other American for a better future but I am not the one to write such a thing. I am at this time seeking any work I can find to survive almost anywhere else doing almost anything. But despite all that I do remember this as a time of hope. Of course it is scholarly memory — I was not alive. I am not sure that there has ever really been much hope in my own life nor am I sure of all the reasons that might be. But I have had joys, successes and pleasures — that is something. More than many have had.

The passage in which first letter to the Corinthians where Saint Paul refers to himself as one born out of due time seems proper as regards my involvement with the 2016 Gulf South History and Humanities Conference. When I was first given the news by Dr. Donald Devore that my paper had been selected for review and presentation among this distinguished group of peers in and from this Gulf South region I was pleased and grateful. This Gulf South Region is pertinent to my subject in this article and in other research and is personally dear to my heart. I realized that having submitted an article rather late in the game I was unusually fortunate to have a chance for this . It seemed even more so as the title included a word — Reemergence_- some would say I have coined although in fact it has been around a while and the only real question is whether reemergence can be considered standard usage or not. The paper discusses the emergence once again of an identification as Americans by nearly all Cajuns and across almost all parts of the region called Acadiana. In the book, I come closer to really proving my points than I do here and use some of anthropology’s scientific method to prove various points but in this paper I still marshall a good bit of evidence and hopefully will get some of that across in this presentation. While this paper is not about my own return and emergence into or reemergence within the academic community it is nonetheless a sign of that very thing for however well are badly this may go it is surely a new level of effort on my part to connect with the profession. I also attempt here to connect with anyone who might not be a member of the Historical profession in any sense and in that sense I seek to address some of the news that seems relevant to the topic. That will be limited as I would like to continue on in this conference after making those remarks and all relevant topics are both emotionally charged and controversial. So I will mention the political race, the Confederate monuments controversy and Colin Kaepernick as illustrations of the idea that American Identity is a relevant area for educated people and even learned societies to discuss. I am not sure there are any other relevant connections between the state of my academic career and the state of ethnic and social identity among the Cajuns in the postwar era. Dr. jeffrey Owens indicated that it was not necessary to thank him for posting this opportunity and for his advice in preparing a suitable presentation — therefore I will not thank him although he richly deserves it. I did tell Dr. Devore by prompt return email that I was honored and grateful and I still am.

Congrats again. Cool topic. Figuring out when southerners felt like Americans again, part of the rest of the U.S. is an interesting question. In Hancock Co, the 4th of July wasn’t celebrated until WWI. A common enemy made a feeling of reunion possible. Good luck with the paper.

Best wishes,

Mark

[4] The March 5. 1949 article incorrectly names Frances Parkinson Keyes as Evelyn and has a few other problems typical of the overworked and understaffed quality of small papers. For while big city papers may have more pressure they also have more resources and so careless errors are ferreted out that a local rural writer carries into eternity on every piece even when they are not added in by other careless errors. The errors are as much the result of cares in many cases as they are of carelessness.

Naval officer, b. in Charles County, Maryland, U.S.A. 27 September, 1809; d. at Point Clear, Alabama, 26 August, 1877. His family were descendants from one of the original Catholic colonists of Maryland, from which state he was appointed a midshipman in the U.S. Navy 1 April, 1826. He served until 1832, when he was given leave of absence extending until July, 1835, during which time he studied law and was admitted to practice. Rejoining the navy, he served with distinction, attaining the rank of commander, until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he resigned and cast his lot with the seceding state of Alabama, of which he became a citizen in 1841. He was appointed commander in the Confederate States Navy, 25 March 1861; Captain, 21 August, 1862; Rear-Admiral, 10 February, 1865; and retired to civil life after the surrender of the forces under General J.E. Johnston at Greensboro, North Carolina, 26 April, 1865. As commander of the Confederate privateer Sumter he destroyed, during six months in 1861, eighteen ships, and the next year, taking command of the Alabama, he began the famous cruise during which he captured sixty-nine vessels and … At the end of the war he went to his home in Mobile, Alabama, and opened a law office. He also edited a paper, and for a time was a professor in the Louisiana Military Institute. His destruction of the mercantile marine during his cruise in the privateer Alabama so embittered northern public opinion against him that, although he was pardoned with other prominent Confederate leaders under the amnesty proclamation of President Johnson, his political disabilities were never removed. He was the author of “Service Afloat and Ashore During the Mexican War” (1851); “The Campaign of General Scott in the Valley of Mexico” (1852); “The Cruise of the Alabama and Sumter” (1864); and “Memoirs of Services Afloat during the War between the States” (1869)

[9]Abbeville Meridional December 29, 1934 in terms of understanding Leblanc’s politics it may be useful to remember that the U.S. Chamber in these years voted to support Roosevelt’s banking and budget measures at the start of the New Deal but opposed legislation introduced in favor of labor unions in 1934 (see: .https://www.uschamber.com/timeline/index.html) Leblanc had business dealings across the country first with the Thibodeaux Benevolent Association and later with HADACOL.

[15] Besides the mire film see also Leblanc’s own book. Another Acadian Citizen Soldier — Public Servant

Edited by Dr. David Moreland, Adrian Vega and Kathryn Joy Vega. Published and Copyrights held by Robert Leblanc. Principal availability is through the Vermilion Parish Library system.

[16] For Yvonne Pavy Weiss’s connection to the Long shooting see the 1993 reissuance by University of Louisiana Press of David Zinman’s 1963 book The Day Huey Long Was Shot. However Zinman is unaware of or does not explain any connection between her and the Evangeline Girls. For Yvonne Pavy’s status as the Evangeline Girl of Opelousas see the Abbeville Meridional issues for August 2, 1930, August 16, 1930 and September 6, 1930.

[17] The very influential book by Harnett T. Kane was referenced in correspondence and in more subtle ways in the work of several documentarians.
The Bayous of Louisiana, Kane, Harnett Thomas; Landry and Tilden illustrators
Bonanza Books, 1943.

[19]Cajun Renaissance Man: Dudley J. Le Blanc, written by Michelle LeBlanc, Produced and distributed in part by Topaz Productions and Wordsmith Productions
57min | Documentary | 14 March 1996 (USA)

[20] I began this project in 1991 and brought it back on track to completion in 2015. Whether it will be completed or not is a different matter.

[21] 2009 publication available mostly at the Acadian Museum and the Vermilion Parish Library. Rights largely reserved by the Sirmon family and estate.

[22] Louisiana Public Broadcasting, 1998 This high-definition public television documentary explores the legacy of Robert Flaherty’sLouisiana Story. This program brings together the surviving key participants of the original 1940’s movie and allows them to comment on this controversial film, including Richard Leacock, legendary cinematographer and associate producer of Louisiana Story, and J.C. Boudreaux, once the emblematic Cajun boy who personified Flaherty’s optimistic vision. Reverse Angle features diverse commentary from native folklorists, artists, filmmakers, and historians who have both studied and shared in the legacy of Louisiana Story.

[23] : This book of merely 152 pages is a real work compelling and fortunate efforts — although in my manuscript I take serious issue with at least one of the critical essays included with Van Dongen’s diary in the publication:

[28]The best work perhaps for getting a feel for the contours of Louisiana’s engagement in the war may be in the form not of a text but of a documentary film. The perspective is not Cajun and a Cajun perspective would have produced different results at various junctures. But the film is able to provide a breadth of understanding for how huge the war was as a lived experience for people in this state.

Louisiana During World War II, documentary film by William B. Robison and Jerry P. Sanson (Baton Rouge: Happy Pigg Studio, 2013), in 6 parts with 16 supplements, beginning with Part 1: Introduction:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeNQKyOXyz4, with subsequent parts also on Youtube.

[29] There are many creditable releases of the film and I provided in email a link for the Admiral Hotel to perhaps make available one of the versions which is in the public domain to all rooms during the Conference. My tone implied that it might be good for them to speak to Conference authorities about how that may best be done and am including this footnote as part of that process. Those who might wish to watch the film in their rooms after other meetings would better understand my paper whether presented before or after the fact.

[34] The Meridional goes on with detail and generous allocation of resources here: The entire cast features local talent. Shown performing ‘Riders in the Sky’ are (left to right) Davlon Rost, Jack Smith and Wayne Hebert. See page 1B for more information and photos.

[36]In 1948, Robert Flaherty was “Louisiana Story”. He was searching for a small boat, or “pirogue” for his young hero played by J.C. Boudreaux. Ebdon Allemon, a Cajun craftsman, was photographed and filmed in the practice of his endangered craft. It seems possible that there was some interchange of responsibilities between Arnold Eagle, Richard Leacock and Robert Flaherty it is not easy to settle all matter of crediting the film. I make assertions in my text but in this paper leave it largely undefined.

[38] This has to do with their identification in terms of leadership and principal tradition with the coutumes of the paix des coutumes which defined Languedoc and in turn defined France to such a large extent until just a couple of generations before the first colonists came to Acadie.

[39] Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie; Poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,many forms available — originally published 1n 1847 by Longfellow who taught some students from Louisiana’s Cajun Country during the relative rise of the Acadians in that era when Acadian leaders were attending schools such as the US Military Academy at West Point and Georgetown University. I t seems he spoke with nathaniel Hwthorne about this story and Hwthorne advised him to write about it. His poem made use of dactylic hexameter, which was used in Greek and Latin classics. It became Longfellow’s most famous work in his lifetime and one of the most popular and respected pieces of literature in the world. My research has tried to explore the powerful effect the poem had in defining both Acadian history as it evolved and as it was studied in the past and the formation of the operative Acadian identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Dudley Leblanc was deeply influenced by and had a great respect for the poem. The Documentarians in general and Flaherty’s group in particular show very little sign that the poem greatly affected their own views of Acadian subjects. Before Longfellow’s poem was drafted from all the sources he examined and published to the world historians focused largely on the British founding of Halifax (1749) as the beginning of Nova Scotia. This was a vastly more false premise than any occasioned by historical errors in the poem. Longfellow’s Evangeline reminded the world of the 150 years of Acadian settlement and journeys of identity that preceded the establishment of Halifax. This is treated well enough in the recent work McKay, Ian and Robin Bates. In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010: 40–42
The Expulsion was planned and executed by New Englanders and British. But while a great friend to the Acadians in many ways across time Longfellow was himself a New Englander and omitted from the poem New England’s responsibility for the event. Also a patriotic American who saw the need for defining an identity across sectional tensions Longfellow defines the British not long before the War of Independence as responsible for the expulsion and its horror. Further America is shown mostly as a place of refuge and there is a people with whom the North can sympathize living in the Southern part of what was by publication the land of the United States of America whose story does not hinge upon slavery and who are not depicted as tied to slavery..

[40] A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland, by John Mack Faragher;:Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.; New York, New York,:02/17/2006

Standard Oil paid for the projects discussed in this book. This last numbered chapter in this book is about them and Humble Oil who worked closely with Louisiana Story. Hopefully it sets in context other references from across the text. It is not long enough to do much more. This chapter is out of sequence on my blog. The thirteenth numbered chapter will have to follow in time. But this is a chapter about the oil industry as well as about funding these pictures. It is a chapter which is only a hint at the breadth of a topic that goes far beyond the book as a whole in many ways.

But despite controversy and complexity the relationships described in this chapter were never all good or all bad. Here a few topics are discussed within the context of what might have meaning for this text and its readers. Much more work could be done in a different book.

Chapter Fourteen: A relatively Humble Standard

The title of this chapter plays with the meaning of the two capitalized names when one is used as an adjective and the other as a noun. Thus this chapter is about Standard Oil and Humble Oil and how in the years between 1943 and 1953 they created a norm for these projects which was tied into their overall management style and philosophy. In contrast to their philosophical approach as it has appeared to other writers and to this writer at other times, this was humble standard of operating procedure. To a great degree oil was trying to fit into America’s energy coast (and yes was hoping to transform it — but–) they saw and others saw the operation of the energy sector in the region as one important set of activities among many. They aspired to lead as has been stated before, but the leadership had a different flavor and texture than other times and places have sometimes been asked to consume. It was easier on the palate.

There is evidence of this in their dealings with Flaherty himself. Flaherty had known great triumphs and Nanook is still at least the equal of Louisiana Story by almost every measure. But he had known a variety of pressured manipulated projects where his work was compromised. Murnau had squeezed him out of directing their supposed collaboration, Tabu. The story one sees on screen was largely written by him and some of the locations and casting may be due to him as well as many other aspects of the fim. But great as the film is in its own right it was Murnau’s as a director and it is more accurate to give Flaherty half a dozen other credits on the film and not to list him as director. That was only his greatest and not his only disappointment in terms of feeling taken advantage of by those with whom he worked. Compared to much of his life’s work this was a his widow Frances later asserted — a princely commission. Princes are not often equated with humility but in fact the royalist ideal is of a gentler and more deft touch in rule than is typical of the tyrant or the dictator. Not to overstate the case this is a story about oil companies which behaved themselves. During the time and in the place which this text describes….

In Chapter Twelve it was remarked that Dudley Leblanc’s thirty-fourth birthday party was an occasion for him to receive a kind of tribute from people from a variety of industries but not the petroleum industry. It is also true that we have discussed how the Broussard Brothers became a very successful firm and remains so today but its growth as a major named focus in the oil industry on the Attakapas Prairie has been a fairly slow process. The firm was located mostly in Chalmette at first and then has gradually assumed more prominence in the region. Only in recent years has it bought the prominent and fairly stately office building in a leafy neighborhood where it now holds sway.Chris Crusta Flying Services was operated by Danny Babin of the Gueydan area and by Chris Crusta of Abbeville. Both were pilots with distinguished military careers however, the firm which provided crop dusting services across the Parish for many years also helped to launch the business career of one of the leading figures in the oilfield in Vermilion Parish and the Prairies. Revis Sirmon was a French speaking native of the region whose family farmed rice and who married a Cajun girl, name Lorraine Breaux, many of his closest friends were Cajuns. Yet Revis Sirmon was a distinctly non Cajun person with his own set of folklore and religious experiences shaping his life. His close relationship with the wealthy rice-milling Godchaux family was a relationship with a white Creole family. Possibly there both not being Cajun entirely formed a common part of their identity in the intensely Cajun region. Revis Sirmon flew fifty combat missions in Europe in World War II and loved to fly. However, after a few years of of the risks of agricultural aviation and with two small children to worry about leaving orphaned he was ready to spend more time on the ground. He went into the oilfield fluids business called the mud business with the backing of Frank Godchaux III. Revis Sirmon’s memoirs, Eternal Pilot, a book co-written with Joseph Chaillot do a good job of charting his life in Acadiana and the tensions between Cajun identity and residence in Acadiana. They also provide a useful glimpse of his rise in the local oilfield world and its ties to world commerce and it also is true that the book like so much else describes many people whom I knew well although it also leaves out a great deal and a great number of people whom I know were involved in the events described. But whatever angle on takes in viewing these things it is different than the take of a book like this one, the scholar has to bring something to the research as it is not the book’s purpose to address any or all of these questions directly. Revis Sirmon was encouraged by the ethnically prominent Charles Broussard of the Flying J. Ranch to ask Edwin Edwards (who has always identified as Cajun) to appoint him to the Mineral Board, while in that position he raised the royalty payments made to the State for mineral leases. However, as an active commercial oilman he was disqualified from future service after seven fairly distinguished years on the board when new ethics rules defined his operations as a conflict of interest. He resigned rather than before the newly propounded rules would have formally disqualified him. My maternal grandfather was in business with Revis Sirmon in a company called Riptide Investors and in developing a port known as Freshwater City. However, almost all of this oilfield story is outside the scope of this book. Almost all but not quite all. It was in 1953, the very end of this period that the pilot known as the Scatterbrain Kid founded his mud company. This was just one more sign of the growing importance of the oilfield and related industries in the immediate region where Louisiana Story had been filmed.

Humble Oil and Standard Oil lend their names to the chapter and especially the capitalization of the words Humble and Standard in its title. They have since merged but at the time of the focus of this study from 1943 to 1953 they were both relatively autonomous and certainly legally independent corporations and each had a distinct and significant role that they played in the production of these photographic projects and the film Louisiana Story. The two companies had national and global connections and so forth but both came from distinct regions in the United States outside of louisiana where they retained significant rootedness. It is not easy to minimize the importance of the oil industry and of Standard Oil of New Jersey and Humble Oil in the production of these projects more than has been done here without leaving aside a very significant part of the story indeed. The truth is that cramming what is left of the essential parts of that story into one chapter is not an entirely satisfying solution either. But it is the solution which is achievable in this case.

GAS RECYCLING PLANT IS ASKED IN ERATH FIELD

Preliminary plans for the erection of a gas recycling plant estimated to cost $2,000,000 in the Erath oil field in Vermilion Parish though the unitization of approximately 3300 acres included in the productive area were discussed at a public hearing held here Monday by Conservation Commissioner Jos. L. McHugh and other members of the committee.

The notice which appears here set in perspective the money spent on Louisiana Story and on the larger photography project. Here there are two points and set of line from which to measure. One is to compare the cost of the film to what Flaherty had spent on other films and also to what Hollywood spent on a feature film. The other set of measures is that established by what the oil and gas industry were spending on other expenditures in the region. That will come back into this chapter and has already appeared in the comments made in Abbeville and Vermilion Parish which appeared in Chapter Eleven of this text. The same little article lends us more insight.

The public hearing was adjourned Tuesday afternoon and will open until the presentation of additional information, it was announced by E. L. Gladney, Jr., attorney for the commission. Other members of the commission attending the hearing were H. N. Bell, director of the minerals division; John J. Huner, state geologist; and Percy Irwin Chief Petroleum Engineer.

We see the importance the newspaper attributes to this commission in giving details of various kinds including names. We see that there is an attorney, a director, a geologist and a petroleum engineer. We also see that the Conservation Commission is a very well established and multifaceted bureaucracy. Additionally the lack of even one distinctly Cajun name or any of the phrases that might be used if the people involved had close ties to large numbers of readers. Such a thing is not entirely determinative of their identity and connections to the place but it does indicate such a level of connections or the lack thereof. This reminds us that the local readership were informed participants but did not necessarily have a shared identity with the oil industry.

The operators owning about 85 percent of the leases located within the productive limits of the Erath field and who are seeking the orders from the commission to unitize the field include the Phillips Petroleum Company, the Texas Company, The Humble Oil and Refining Company and the Tidewater Associated Oil Company.

“We believe that the Erath field constitutes one of the greatest and most valuable reserves of gas-distillate and gas-condensates now known to exist in the entire mid-continent area,” declared Dan DeBaillon, Lafayette, attorney who represented the operators. “We can state frankly, with the firmest of convictions, that waste of a large percentage of these valuable resources is eminent, and inescapable, if this field be either unoperated. Wisely planned development and intelligent operation of this field as a unit, as distinguished from development and operation on a wasteful basis, will result in the recoveries of millions of barrels of distillate and condensate not otherwise recoverable and at the same time, billions of “cubic feet “of gas can be saved by returning the gas to the productive formations. This returned gas, by, helping to maintain the reservoir pressure, will itself greatly increase the ultimate recoveries of distillate and condensate and also will itself, as gas, have a value in dollars and cents estimated in terms of millions of dollars.

Here we see that Humble Oil which would interact closely with Standard Oil in pursuing the making of Louisiana Story was accustomed to interaction with other oil companies in unitization hearings, in other interactions with the Conservation Committee and in a variety of other circumstances. While they had a special relationship with Standard Oil the industry itself was to some degree a cohesive community which could pursue its community interests in ways not so disimilar from the way that the Cajuns and the documentarians also formed communitiescapable of pursuing community interests.

The article goes on at some length and its detail in some places is at least some real and fairly compelling evidence that the readers of the Meridional had a fairly sophisticated understanding of the oil industry at the start of the SONJ projects. It also shows the Vermilion Parish definitively had relationships with Humble Oil.

The oil industry was remaking the realities of the life in Acadiana during the years between 1943 and 1953. One of the purposes of this chapter will be to understand through the lense of the work done on Louisiana Story and the rest of the SONJ projects how the oil industry operates and what its culture was as regard interacting with the people, local culture and the environment of Acadiana. Without going into great detail we will seek to understand as well to what degree the portrayal of the oil interests is a valid one — mostly in the film but also briefly revisiting their portrayal in the photographic projects. There are various levels of distrust for that portrayal which are possible and in this study we will at least be honest about what level of mistrust is at the foundation of our study. This is a book largely about perception and understanding. Here we take a further step back and ask ourselves how we ought to perceive both the role of the oil company and industry that funded these projects and the wa way that historians, scholars in general and others have perceived those involvements up to now.

One real factor to remember in the midst of documenting and analyzing these projects and the people and places that they chose to document is that Standard Oil was footing the bill. The relationship between Humble Oil and Standard oil was a complicated one and a complete understanding of that relationship is beyond the scope of this text. However one of the objectives of this chapter will be to create a basic framework of understanding for that relationship in its most basic configuration without much appreciation for the nuances and complexities of the full reality even where those different and varied complexities may have shaped and impacted the experiences of the production and organization of the SONJ photography project and the Flaherty unit that created Louisiana Story.

I was honored to sit with Mr. Sirmon for a year (2008) and gather his stories, organize them, and ghost write this book for him (as acknowledged in the Introduction). I will be glad to answer any questions I can about it … Joseph Chaillot ( josephchaillot@gmail.com

At this writing there are over 125 years of ExxonMobil history and one can fairly trace the evolution of the company to many stories including that of Humble Oil as well as that of Mobil. But the main story is surely still that of Standard Oil which has evolved and developed from a New Jersey based and largely regional distributor and marketer of kerosene in the U.S. to the iconic symbol of an industry which is only overshadowed by state firms in a few countries and is the largest publicly traded petroleum and petrochemical joint stock corporation in the world. The company in 1943 and in 1953 was closer to today’s firm than to its origins. The biggest difference is perhaps hidden behind a similarity is that while ESSO and EssoMarine were prominent brands that had the kind of currency still true of the company’s dealings with the larger world today as today they operate in most of the world’s countries and are readily identified familiar brand names: Exxon, Esso and Mobil. There was another name that really mattered in those days and was essential to the life of the firm and which is not so important today.

That name was Rockefeller.

Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge, located in eastern Cameron and western Vermilion Parishes, is owned and maintained by the State of Louisiana. When deeded to the state the refuge encompassed approximately 86,000 acres, but beach erosion has taken a heavy toll, and the most recent surveys indicate only 76,042 acres remaining. This area borders the Gulf of Mexico for 26.5 miles and extends inland toward the Grand Chenier ridge, a stranded beach ridge, six miles from the Gulf. When the Rockefeller Foundation officially granted the property to the state, they spelled out in the Deed of Donation exactly how the property was to be used. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service makes periodic inspections of refuge activities and has reversionary rights over the refuge if the state fails to meet its obligations pertaining to the Deed of Donation, as amended. The major terms of the original agreement stipulated 1) the property must be maintained as a wildlife refuge, 2) boundaries must be posted, 3) enforcement agents must protect the area from trespassers and poachers, 4) no public taking of fish or animals is allowed, 5) refuge staff must study and manage the property for wildlife, and 6) mineral revenues must be used on the refuge first (surplus may go toward education or public health). In 1983 the Deed of Donation was amended with a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) between the Department of the Interior and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. The MOA allows for regulated sport fishing and commercial trapping when compatible with the primary purpose of the refuge as a wildlife sanctuary. The MOA also allows surplus revenues to be used for land acquisition for wildlife management purposes. A 1987 MOA between the same two agencies ceased yielding surplus revenues for education or public health. Planners had the foresight to realize that mineral revenues would cease at some point in time, and steps were taken to ensure that the refuge would be financially capable of operation and maintenance indefinitely. Act 321 of the 1972 legislature created the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge Trust and Protection Fund (Trust Fund). One fourth of funds derived from royalties, rentals, or otherwise from Rockefeller mineral leases were to be deposited in the Trust Fund until a principal of $5 million was reached. Act 342 in 1978 raised the Trust Fund goal to $10 million. Act 807 in 1980 increased the Trust Fund goal to $20 million, and also established the Rockefeller Scholarship Fund for Louisiana wildlife students from 5% of interest from the Trust Fund. Act 63 of 1982 raised the Trust Fund goal to $30 million, and Act 707 of 1989 reduced additions to the Trust Fund from 25% to 5% of mineral revenues. Senate Bill 662 of 1989 established an annual donation of $150,000 to the Fur and Alligator Advisory Council, and Act 832 of 1995 raised the Trust Fund cap to $50 million. Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge is one of the most biologically diverse wildlife areas in the nation. Located at the terminus of the vast Mississippi Flyway, south Louisiana winters about 4 million waterfowl annually. Historically, Rockefeller wintered as many as 400,000-plus waterfowl annually, but severe declines in the continental duck population due to drought and poor habitat quality on the breeding grounds have altered Louisiana’s wintering population. More recent surveys indicate a wintering waterfowl population on Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge reaching 160,000. In addition to ducks, geese, and coots, numerous shorebirds and wading birds either migrate through or overwinter in Louisiana’s coastal marshes. Neotropical migrant passerines also use the shrubs and trees on levees and other “upland” areas of the refuge as a rest stop on their trans-Gulf journeys to and from Central and South America. Although Canada geese no longer migrate to the refuge from breeding areas in the north as they once did, a resident flock of giant Canada geese was established in the early 1960s. Common resident animals include mottled ducks, nutria, muskrat, rails, raccoon, mink, otter, opossum, white-tailed deer, and alligators. An abundant fisheries population provides recreational opportunities to fishermen seeking shrimp, redfish, speckled trout, black drum, and largemouth bass, among others. No hunting is allowed on the refuge, but some regulated trapping is allowed for furbearers that could potentially damage the marsh if their populations are not controlled. The refuge is a flat, treeless area with highly organic soils which are capable of producing immense quantities of waterfowl foods in the form of annual emergents and submerged aquatics. Since 1954 Rockefeller Refuge has been a test site for various marsh management strategies, including levees, weirs, and several types of water control structures utilized to enhance marsh health and waterfowl food production.

The style of this text has been a bit less orthodox and strict in adhering to the manner in which some other standards of text have been put together by competent people seeking to establish a norm. Standard Oil was becoming a leading company in offshore exploration and was involved with others in that field and in deep drilling. But there world’s largest refinery in Baton Rouge was leading the way to providing the petrochemical building blocks that would lead to thousands of consumer goods. An would usher in many of the most unique qualities of the emerging era an era of the very start of a process which would distinguish previous worldwide international commerce from what is called globalization. Standard Oil itself was a mature and venerable institution. In the 2007 film There Will Be Blood American and international viewers were reminded, if they had not already known, that the oil industry has been around for a while. This film was loosely based on the 1926 novel OIL! By Upton Sinclair. That novel dealt with many of the issues explored by people involved in these events — and yet it is a profoundly different story. But regional texture, capitalism, a rough and dangerous industry, powerful personalities and socialism are all themes common both to this book and its subjects as well as to Sinclair’s novel and its subjects.

Standard Oil may not have been the name of the concern but in the Rockefeller dominated era and even today the company that became Exxon was well aware of its heritage going back to the same year the Abbeville based history of the Vigilante Committees of the Attakapas was written by a French historian living among these people that year was 1859 when the remembered exploring entrepreneurs

Colonel Edwin Drake and Uncle Billy Smith drilled the first successful oil well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. The colonel’s discovery triggered an oil boom that in many ways resembled the gold rush of a decade earlier. The internal combustion engine was a long way into the future.as the icon of oil consumption. However it was also in 1859 that Jean Joseph Étienne Lenoir created the first commercially successful internal combustion engine. As the oil industry prepared to lead its way in creating this region’s future few felt it was in any way a fledgling enterprise.

Lionel Leblanc and Robert Flaherty’s parent’s generation were in some cases unborn, were in diapers or in the case of a few late to procreate were when in 1870 Rockefeller and his associates formed the Standard Oil Company (Ohio), with combined facilities constituting the largest refining capacity of any single firm in the world at that time and seemingly exceeding any comparable entity consisting of consortia or government entities. In America 79 years is a fairly long time compared to most other continents. The idea that they were leading America to a new future does not mean that they were themselves perceived as new. The name Standard is chosen to signify high, uniform quality and the name Rockefeller .was iconic as a symbol of wealth and prestige. It would be foolish and would distort the story to pretend that Flaherty, Stryker or the Cajuns did not have a healthy respect for all things Standard Oil.

In 1882 the SONJ entity which has its name or initials stamped on so many documents in this project came to be. It was in that year that it touched another great American icon when

Standard Oil lubricated the invention of the man who also revolutionized the film industry by revolutionizing a system related to film itself. Standard Oil contributed to Thomas Edison’s first central generating system by providing lubricants from its new chemical divisions.. Besides SONJ in this year, Standard Oil Trust formed to include the Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony) and in those years SONJ was referred to usually as the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and shortened to two words rather than four letters –Jersey Standard. .

In 1885 the company became associated with New York City, where documentary film and photography had its main American nest from 1920 to 1953 at the very shortest duration. That year the Standard Oil Trust relocated its corporate headquarters to 26 Broadway, New York City. The nine-story office building became a landmark which would have been known to the majority of the scene and history conscious film and camera people involved in this set of projects long before they worked for Standard Oil.

In 1911, following a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision, that reshaped a lot of the United States in its view of itself in economic terms Standard Oil was broken up into 34 unrelated companies, including Jersey Standard, the SONJ which funded this photographic venture. The year also marks the first time Jersey Standard’s sales of kerosene are surpassed by gasoline, conjectures about a photographic bias against horses which seems evident if in fact it exists would be related to the fact that by the 1940s the company depended largely on a product that in the early days had often been discarded as a waste product. In 1911 many buggies could carry a kerosene lantern and be good customers. Auto racing became part of the Standard Oil legacy through Mobil products in the decades between 1911 and 1943.

In 1919 the company that actually furnished the drillers for Louisiana Story became a real part of the Standard Oil family and tradition when SONJ or

Jersey Standard acquired a 50 percent interest in Humble Oil & Refining Company of Texas. In that same year Humble Oil , led by its pioneering Chief Geologist Wallace Pratt, developed the full commercial employment of micropaleontology in oil exploration.This study of microscopic fossils contained in cuttings and core samples from drilling was an aid in finding oil which tied the Oil industry more to local universities in various region and made the science and technology of the industry a bit more compelling. It laid the foundation for the kind of postwar industrial leadership sought in this set of projects.

Just about the time these projects were getting cranked up and closer to the subject of this text in 1942, the world’s first fluid catalytic cracker went into onstream operation at Louisiana Standard’s Baton Rouge refinery. The process, was developed by four SONJ scientists known as the “four horsemen,” and became the worldwide industry standard for producing gasoline. Fortune magazine when it covered the story described it as “the most revolutionary chemical-engineering achievement of the last 50 years.” In the fifties SONJ would found more cultural and educational programs and more automobile related products as centerpieces of its overall vision. Those fascination with shaping culture through the Esso Education Foundation after 1955 and the increased interest in playing a dominant role in serving the needs of automobiles after the development of Uniflo in 1952 doubtless affected these projects, though this text does not provide a close analysis of how that played out.

This chapter simply provides a bit of history to serve as a background to other observations made throughout the text. It is very far from exhaustive and does not disclose a great deal of highly compelling close analysis of Standard’s role here. But it is the place to make a few assertions if there is indeed any such place.

Standard Oil and its competitors and friends funded education, built things and employed people. But Cajun technology in building, dredging, design and drainage was seldom incorporated except by a few who struggled hard to do so. Lack of respect for the accumulated knowledge of regional conditions had a powerful negative set of impacts on the region from the Cajun point of view.

Standard Oil and the Rockefellers with deeply Baptist Protestant heritage may well be responsible for the lack of Catholicism in Louisiana Story simply because of their enormous general reputation. Likewise, the other desires and needs of that family and coporation likely transmitted themselves across the project with little direct efforts from those at the top of the power structures involved. All evidence for this is general in nature at this point and may exist in specific form or may not.

Cajun inventions continued to proliferate in navigation, crawfish farming seafood processing and elsewhere across the region, horseracing and breeding of the Cajun quarter horse continued to produce ethnic excellence. There is a sense among many that Cajun leadership in this industry and the cultural accommodations that could have produced better relationships never fully materialized.

Both Huey Long and Dudley Leblanc were at different times Public Service Commissioners and as such dealt with the oil and gas industry. The importance of this industry to all sides of the political spectrum over a much larger period than is central to this text can scarcely be disputed. Longism was of course more influential and successful than whatever Leblancism may be said to be. On the other hand, Huey was killed by the husband of one of Dudley Leblanc’s Evangeline girls Yvonne Pavy for suggesting that she had Negro blood. Weis’s family disputes that claim and he was in many respects one of the finest and most gifted citizens of Louisiana in his time. But it is highly credible that the dictator was killed for insulting the genealogy in question by a man who considered himself and his family superior specimens to Long himself. Dudley Leblanc, diminished over time but died in peace and as a fairly old man. The oil industry although soaked by Huey in many ways was more associated with Huey and the Long Machine than with Dudley Leblanc.

These projects coincided with the last great push of Dudley Leblanc in politics. Had he been closer to the oil industry and less close to four or five other industries it is quite possible that his fortunes would have continued to rise and the period would have been a different one than it was.

In conclusion to this chapter, Standard oil is not at the heart of this text about a project it made possible. But in many ways it chose to take a back seat, to hide behind the scenery and many other metaphors. They influenced many things but determined very few. There chapter is the last numbered chapter before the conclusion and their role is the least thoroughly studied of the communities whose interactions define this text.

This is a special chapter among many chapters that are special to me because it focuses on the life, work and views of one man as a context for what was going on in the region when the documentarians (or documentarists as is often preferred) arrived in Acadiana. Dudley Leblanc is man mentioned many times in the text before now and a great deal is left out even after this chapter is read. In fact he too has his place in the conclusion. In a different world this book would have been written long ago and there would be another book out under my name about Dudley Leblanc alone. But such is not the case. In fact this serialization is running up against difficulties born of my relative weariness doing other things entirely separate from this book.

The politics of Dudley Leblanc are mostly the focus of this chapter and the personal life with the business aspects only creeping in a bit. The merest glimpses into a full and rich life of great complexity. But politics is very much in the fabric of Acadian and Cajun culture and the tradition of these places that make up Acadiana. Politics has always mattered to me as anyone can tell who reads this blog. I am not in any way the kind of political figure that Dudley Leblanc was in this region but he does sort of fill the atmosphere of all politics with a kind of (to me at least) glory tinted residue.

My grandfather was influenced by and we are related to Dudley Leblanc. I once watched an old home movie of them on a boat together. Warren Perrin pictured with me below has made available to me recently some fascinating materials provided by the heirs of Corinne Broussard, one of the Evangeline Girls who made the first pilgrimage with Dudley Leblanc to Acadie. His legacy lives on ….

Dudley Leblanc was an author, historian, showman, President of the Association of Louisiana Acadians, the leader of the lawful opposition to what many consider to be the closest thing to a dictatorship ever under the United States Flag, he was a devout Catholic , a family man and a skilled legislator. He wrote a charted song and besides all of that was a very serious businessman. But he was part of Acadiana and it was part of him in a uniquely strong way that showed through all he did. He loved Louisiana and the United States and worked with Acadians and their causes in several countries but he was our politician — the great contribution of this place and time to politics . His influence is still around even when it is not noted. But his French language radio shows, his huge business which disappeared like a fairy dream and his superb devotion to his ethnic community framed his politics and gave them life.

HADACOL was once the second largest advertiser in the United States.

There is a tendency among some to see him as style over substance but nothing could be farther from the truth. In my view only a tiny handful of U.S. politicians have equaled his substance but his substance was not the substance many analysts are looking to find. He left a book behind which is fifty years old this year which along with founding state parks in this state, helping to create an old age pension, negotiating countless positive deals in the opposition and opposing others — along with all of that his book is his legacy. His family is of course as well.

The Acadian Miracle by Dudley Leblanc is fifty years old this year.

The Acadian Museum in Erath is a place where a great deal of his legacy is preserved and new materials are still coming to light in their efforts to archive and preserve things. You can link to them here. The rather poor picture of Warren Perrin and I together that I have above is taken in the Acadian Museum and below is another I took related to the Museum. They remain and are active in outreaches across the community that Leblanc loved.

Acadian Museum table at an Abbeville farmer’s market.

Here is where the text in pdf form will be when a technical glitch is cured :

He is the chapter in such text form as is available:

Chapter Twelve:

Dudley Leblanc and the Sense of Acadiana

This set of chapter in this book is in large part a collection of and commentary upon clipping. My use of scholarly quotes earlier on was more extensive than average and so the change should not be too drastic. I prefer to use enough of my source material to let it speak for itself where it can. This text seeks to bring together many distincto points of view to create a whole which the reader can inhabit much as the mind inhabits a bit of fine verse or fiction. Entering into all these points of view the reader can form his or her own point of view.

Early in this chapter, second only to a clipping from 1928 and excerpt from a play there is a brief article from the Abbeville Meridional in the 1930s. It reports on an act of violence perpetrated against a Boudreaux from Abbeville in large part because of his association with Dudley Leblanc. Without understanding the violence that runs through Cajun experience there is no way to understand Cajun experience. Cajuns are a people whatever else that are and they are a small people. It would be interesting to do a book about Cajun courage entirely — but that is not this book. This writer that I am is also a man. As a man I consider myself a fairly brave man ( and by my own lights that has never been a very wise thing to say in public or in writing for almost anyone) but it is not in doubt that a small group of people who value ethnic identity are by definition at risk perpetually. It does not take all that much reasoning to figure that out. Languedoc with is structure of confederated ethnic communities within a powerful nation state which accepted these diverse communities is a kind of paradise dream for our way of viewing the world. The Confederacy as our ancestors hoped it might be is another. The golden age of the 1840s saw this sort of life more or less achieved under the banner of the stars and stripes. But the bad times have been many and of varying seriousness. Much of politics in this and many other modern societies with which the Cajun has to interact appears to be the wholesale degradation of any real chance of cultural integrity or any real chance of preserving a responsible policy as regards culture. When the Cajun is urged by others to discard the burdens of his or her culture because others are doing so this often appears to the true Cajun like the suggestion like the serious suggestion that he cut off his fingers because a friend had to change gloves. We will return to that metaphor or strong simile at the end of this chapter.

Before reaching the article about Boudreaux and Leblanc the reader will read a brief excerpt from a play about a Boudreaux and a Leblanc. In the midst of all of this the reader hopefully remembers that a Boudreaux and a Leblanc had the largest Cajun roles as the father and son LaTour in Louisiana Story. Any reader who is not a Cajun should remember that Dudley Leblanc probably saw America differently that the readers parents or grandparents in ways that were specific to the Cajun experience. But the Cajun experience also varied and Leblanc is a very individual and specific person. This chapter is about Dudley Leblanc and the way that he represented a focus and expression of Cajun identity.

This text is not intended to comply with the conventions of a text written about the history of New York City because there is a certain body of knowledge about New York City which is part of the patrimony of educated American ‘s cultural patrimony and which is not applicable to discussion of postwar Acadiana. In addition to the need to make clearer some basic facts about each relevant aspect of Cajun life and Acadiana there is also the cost to this writer which perhaps is made less by being middle aged, divorced and more or less permanently curmudgeonly not to mention childless. As was evident in Gene Yoes review of Louisiana Story in 1949, people worry about the perception of larger society which is created by almost any assessment or expression of the culture, identity or way of life of the people here. Defensiveness is commonplace enough, so is courage and so is the pressure to produce work without the supports for research and a quality process of authentication which might be available for other subjects. In addition the conditions described above make the producers of plays, films, histories, journalism, songs and other works responsive ot questions and concerns of the ethnic community more sensitive to criticism than they might otherwise be — none of this makes a text of this type easier to write. On the other hand, these are differences of degree. Any book about perceptions and understanding between American communities is fraught with some of the same challenges though perhaps not to the same degree — nonetheless, to a substantial degree. Dudley Leblanc and his family appear in the social and personal notices sections of the Meridional so many times it is difficult to express without superlatives. That context is worth remembering when we discuss the man as this text does.

Below is a piece about his birthday party which appeared in the August 25 issue of 1928.

LEBLANC WAS HONORED AT BIRTHDAY DINNER

Dudley J. LeBlanc, who is also head of the T. B. A. Benevolent Association was guest of honor at a surprise birthday dinner given Saturday night at the Terrace Hotel. Over 100 employees, business associates, and other friends of the Commissioner attended. An orchestra played during the evening.

Greetings were extended to Commissioner LeBlanc by several speakers, the first being T. L. Evans, president of the Commercial National Bank, Robert Voorhies, manager, and Miss Sadie Folse, secretary of the T. B. A. and V. Gray qf the Dixie National Insurance Association, and Sidney Alpha for the Lafayette Tribune in which Mr LeBlanc is also interested.

Near the close of the banquet the honoree was presented with a platinum gold watch as a gift from his employees The presentation was made by Bennett J. Voorhies, local attorney.

Another feature of the occasion was the presentation of a large birthday cake on which were 34 candles. The cake was a gift from Mrs. H. Scranton, proprietor of the Terrace Hotel

— Advertiser, Lafayette.

Comparing the pictures here and scene of the trappers eating in Louisiana Story to what Dudley Leblanc’s wife Evelyn Hebert Leblanc experienced as dinner with her girlfriends is also useful. It illustrates a set of contexts for the Cajun experience at the time and a set of experiences neither the documentarian backgrounds and presuppositions nor the interests of Standard Oil of New Jersey were eager to see presented to the nation as the Cajun experience at the time of the nascent oil boom. In that context it is useful to notice that in the list of interests above which feted Dudley Leblanc there are financial, hospitality, professional and print media among others — but no specific petroleum interests. So now on to the life of Mrs. Dudley Leblanc:

MRS. ROBERT YOUNG JUNIOR ENTERTAINS 500 NIGHT CLUB

Another delightful, meeting of the 500 night club was held Wednesday night with Mrs. Robert Young, Jr., at hostess. This beautiful home on Main St. was beautifully arranged with vases and bowls of nasturtiums. Ladies’ first prize was won by Mrs. R. A., Dalton. Second by Mrs. H; A. Eldredge. Guest by Mrs. E. L. Terrier* Gentleman’s first prize was won by Mr. Clay Summers. Second by Dr. P. J. Young, Jr., Guest by, Mr. Andrew Broussard, Consolation by Miss Della Broussard and Booby by Mr. I. H. Oertling.

This house was on the same street where the film Louisiana Story was edited and where the crew lived and the people in story were by and large as Cajun as Lionel Leblanc or the fictional LaTours. Mr. and Mrs. Clay Summers were my great grandparents. While he was born an anglo-protestant she was a very Cajun French speaking Catholic named Esther Leblanc and was Dudley’s cousin. The choices made of what to portray are real choices continually made in the creation of an American identity and sense of self.

Dudley Leblanc’s connection to the community is glimpsed a bit in the coverage of his wedding in the Meridional. A lot more could be gleaned from it than will be attempted in this chapter. The following appeared as a social announcement in the Meridional in 1921 and was a significant sign of social and community recognition for a fairly important match which would be meaningful for Abbeville, Vermilion Parish and the Cajun community. The wedding is certainly not a sumptuous affair to rival the elite of Europe or New York City and the notice does not claim that it is — but it is not the stuff of a trapper’s cabin either.

One of the pretty church weddings of the season was that of Miss Evelyn Hebert, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Morgan Hebert of this place , to Mr. Dudley LeBlanc, of Erath, on March 29th, at 8 o’clock a. m. at St. Mary Magdelein’s Catholic Church.. The marriage ceremony was performed at mass. The bride was handsomely gowned in white embroidered chiffon with illusion veil, while the maid of honor and bridesmaids wore pink organdy gowns and pink picture hats. Miss Evelyn stands high in this community and has many friends. The happy young couple left on the morning train on their honeymoon trip. On their return they will occupy their own little bungalow on the West side of the Bayou which is just completed. The Meridional wishes them a long life of prosperity.

A later announcement in the Meridional’s social notices completes the coverage of this early state of their union. It is worth remembering what is not included in the portrayals of the Cajun communities in the SONJ projects but to remember that these goings on were quite important to the community as a whole..

April 19, 1921, Mr. and Mrs. Dudley Leblanc returned from their honeymoon * trip to New Orleans, Sunday.

It is useful to remember which Cajuns were not much included in the SONJ projects to represent these people in either the photographic collection or the film Louisiana Story. Dudley Leblanc lived a very different life overall than the one lived by the natural actor Lionel Leblanc. LaTour and the actor who portrayed him were clearly selections with political, economic and moral dimensions made by the Flahertys and by Standard Oil of New Jersey which led to a particular view of the people and region portrayed in Louisiana Story. The influence of Harnett Kane’s book The Bayous of Louisiana is deeply to be felt in so many SONJ choices. The use of Avery Island is certainly suggested by Kan’s appealing treatment of that locale. Kane also reports on living with a trapper family and in doing so really maps out a rough draft for Louisiana Story even in the happenstantial way that this unrelated segment of his book is near the segment on Avery Island. The discourse of real outsiders continues to inform itself primarily and to primarily seek to avoid being informed by the Cajun community as a whole. The effort to communicate Cajun experience to the mainstream society is not so simple a task for those within the community either.

However, much this text may seem to be a web of the author’s close personal associations it is actually more the case that the reader gets only a minimal sense of all the connections between this writer and his subject. A choice has been made to make such connections but not without also many specific choices to limit such references.

The following is an excerpt from the play A Sort of Miracle in Loreauville, published by Edgemoor Press, of Houston Texas. The playwright was a returning undergraduate who had gone from Abbeville to Louisiana State University as an undergraduate where she had become pregnant for a son, hid the pregnancy and dropped out. She had given that son up for adoption, moved to Abbeville and married and old friend, nearly an early puppy love and a son of a prominent local family. They had a child in 1964 and did not have any others for a long time. When that young son began attending school she returned to the University of Southwestern Louisiana and wrote a play for an English class which was published. She did not graduate at that time but graduated after her son who was in first grade in 1973 graduated many years later. She is still very much alive at this writing and she is my mother.

The play is set in 1900s Loreauville where her own grandmother grew up, 1900s Loreauville provided the setting, motifs and characters about which her grandmother — Regina Oubre Hollier composed a series of paintings some of which were awarded various honors, sold and given other recognition at the time of her writing A Sort of Miracle. This conversation takes place as a priest is preparing the sacrament of the sick, also the last rites (in an irreducible tension) for a very sick little girl, Madame Leblanc is the girl’s mother.

MADAME LEBLANC: Pere Boudreaux, he’s a good man of God, him. So holy. You should have heard how strong he prayed for MArie. It was so beautiful… (serenely) they say that when the blessing is given, sometimes they have a miracle.

DUBOIS: Prayer is very good for the soul, and I’m sure the good Lord has some plans for us all, but miracles seem to be getting scarcer all the time. Science is teaching us more about things that used to be explained in other ways.

MADAME LEBLANC: I don’t know nothing about science. I only know the Lord. He hears everybody’s prayer and he always answers. Sometimes he answer “no” because he knows everything what’s best. Maybe if He takes Marie up to Heaven, it means that she couldn’t never have been happy here.

DUBOIS: Maybe so.

The play is about the 1900 and is also very much about becoming an adult in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There is not on the surface much to connect it with the period of 1943 to 1953 nor with the life of Dudley Leblanc outside of names and ethnicities but in fact there are some connections that are worth making.

The pardon was approved on recommendation, of the state pardon board. Jones had previously been reprieved by the governor before serving any of a six months jail sentence imposed*by Judge Caruth Jones in East Baton Rouge district court.

Boudreaux –,. friend and supporter of Dudley J. Leblanc opponent of the political’ organization of Huey P. Long in the 1932 governorship campaign in which he ran against Allen — suffered a fractured skull when he was slugged in front of the Statehouse. Boudreaux said he was struck from behind while being put out of the capitol by two men. He blamed political animosity.

The article above appeared in the Abbeville Meridional on November 17 of 1934. Everyone knows what a highwayman is — an outlaw and a land pirate. The headline is fairly confrontational while the legitimacy of the corrupt government itself is not directly challenged. The truth is that Louisiana politics in general is now and always has been a pretty rough business. But most people agree that Huey Long was the toughest character to deal with in Louisiana politics since the period of Statehood. His use of violence, corruption and intimidation were underreported. Huey Long was one of his most visible and vocal opponents. The British Empire, the Union armies and a variety of other large opponents are part of the heritage of opponents which Cajuns remember their ancestors opposing. Cajuns did not dream up and do not dream up reasons to be defensive. But neither is there any overly simplistic basis for all feelings of ethnic concern. Earlier in this text I put forward a brief allusion to evidence (which I believe to be substantial) that the ku Klux Klan was at the very least influenced by Cajun institutions and associations at it inception and in its early days. However, that does not mean that the Klan was not seen as a threat by the Cajuns of the Dudley Leblanc era along with many other threats. The following is an excerpt shortened mostly because of places where the text was problematic for physical reasons rather than for content. During the time when Dudley leblanc was directly facing other issues the Meridional which covered him faithfully was also reporting on the matters related to the Klan in the region. Very little of the topic appeared in the Meridional compared to other matters which were related to ongoing conflict but the discussion that does appear is worth noting..

A STALE TOPIC

For a long time the Ku Klux Klan question has practically been ignored by the leading local papers of the state, but the recent statements of R I. Thompson, at a Klan initiation near Baton Rouge, has partially revived the discussion. ….Thompson reasserted the ancient fallacies of the hooded order “The Klan does not believe in religious prejudices …. but the Klan is a fraternal structure it has no negro members ‘ The Klan is a Christian order therefore no Jews are admitted ” “The Klan is an American order. Therefore no Catholics could be admitted, because the Catholics owe allegiance to a foreign power, and therefore are not American in the Klan’s understanding of the word ” Wise qualification–“Klan’s understanding ” Of course if that is the honest “understanding” of the Klansmen it is their American privilege to so understand. We are ready to excuse the ignorant member of the order, who follows the lead of unscrupulous stump speakers, but how a man of Thompson’s supposed intelligence can voice such idiotic statements is one of the mysteries we are unable to solve. By the above statement as well as several others Mr Thompson qualifies for a special niche in the Menckenian category of “dull and dangerous asses.” We are very sorry to have to touch on this disagreeable subject again but we pride ourselves on letting it down easy…

It is not easy to write this text from the position which I take as a fifty one year old man who has done a good bit of living but it has proven impossible to complete it earlier. I think it would not only be dishonest but pointless for me to attempt to write this text as though it seemed likely that was going to witness a golden age of Cajun wellbeing, or that I thought things in America were really going very well or that I believed that all in all the world was making excellent progress in all the most important ways. So it is that I do not see the end of struggle for ethnic identity and the preservation and perfection of a sense of community as being a process that will be likely to end either. The question of American identity posed by the Klan is not one which this text has sought to avoid although it has not centered on what constitutes the nature of Roman Catholicism. I started with the clipping about the birthday party in part because it allows a chance to see that whatever struggle may typify much of Cajun experience in the United States it is not an entirely strident and directly confrontational struggle. Cajuns do not live lives in which ethnic interests and mainstream interests are always pitted against one another, It is not a community that alway seeks to see things in stark confrontational terms even when it would be possible to see things that way. Below is an example of one struggle handled by Dudley Leblanc and reported by the Meridional. There was an article introducing and explaining the context of his open letter but only the letter is reproduced below because it gives a voice to Dudley Leblanc in a manner which is one of the objectives of this Chapter.

. LOUISIANA PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION

Sept. 12th, 1929.

Abbeville Meridional, Abbeville, La;

Gentlemen,’ You will probably be interested in knowing that I have had the train schedule restored. The schedule was changed without consent or approval of the Commission and it has been; a pleasure for me to be of some assistance to the good people of Abbeville. There will be a formal hearing in the near future, probably at Abbeville, where both sides of the question can be heard before a member of the Commission and the case will then be decided as to whether the schedule will be changed or left as it is now.

With kind regards and best wishes, I remain,

Very truly yours,

Dudley J. Leblanc

In all of his political career Leblanc was fully engaged in real struggles for a better quality of life for his community and these struggles were not couched in terms of ethnic confrontation most of the time.

But the Cajuns are and always have been devoted to the American experience and identity even during the long spell between about 1875 and 1940 when most Cajuns only called themselves Americans in a legal or very formal and explicit context. Nonetheless, in all those years there was an effort to merge effectively with each era of American institutions. But the Cajun vision of America did not always resemble the mainstream vision very closely: Nonetheless, in understanding a man like Dudley Leblanc it is useful to understand this desire to succeed as a true American and to see Cajuns succeed as true Americans. This second glimpse from the Meridional shows that aspect of Leblanc and of Cajun life as well. It does so in a subtle and not very flag-waving kind of way.

The Chamber of Commerce in Lafayette at that time and in any part of the united States at any time is an institution devoted to the relatively optimistic pursuit of commerce, development and well being in the context of the commercially viable and economically vibrant United States of America. Dudley Leblanc who was not less an ethnic activist than many other form better known communities, was also a member of the Chamber of Commerce and accepted most of its values and vision for America.

Acadiana had never been isolated in the sense that a handful of places are. Rather it had always been a place of commerce, change and migration since the time the first Cajuns began to emerge as such. In this text one of the challenges has been to try to show an ethnic community which is in continuous change within a larger American social and cultural context. Dudley J. Leblanc was a voice for the region and also for the Cajun people. It is important to understand the totality of his involvement in the issues of his time and the life of the state and the region. The questions of whether he lived in better times or worse for the Cajuns and for this region cannot be answered fully here. But to the degree that this text sees him as an influence over the SONJ Projects and over the region that they came to document he must be properly understood or nothing much is gained by way of understanding in referring to his influence. In earlier chapters the work of Leblanc as regard Cajun identity has been the only focus of discussion in this regard and some brief applications of that aspect of his life and work to the film Louisiana Story. But a great deal more remains to be discussed if he is to be at all understood.

One fact worth remembering is that Dudley Leblanc had a large set of connections across the nation and the globe. Merely to catalogue these would take a great while. But his core constituents were kept abreast of many of his contacts through the local press. For every two Cajun associations with a specific quality he had two that were about some other aspect of what he saw as the real American fabric of life.

TBA Celebrates Thirteenth Anniversary

Celebrating the thirteenth anniversary of the TBA American Benefit Association, a number of persons were guests of Dudley J. Leblanc at a delightful party at the Edgewater Club near Lafayette. Formerly known as the TBA Benevolent Association, and operating mostly in Louisiana, the TBA American Benefit Association has enlarged its scope until now it operates in practically every state in the United States. The main offices are located in Lafayette. President Leblanc of this association is a native of Vermilion Parish and a resident of Abbeville.

As Dudley Leblanc’s life progressed his political career became one of his most distinguishing endeavors. It would grow apace with his business ventures. Space will not allow me to reproduce the more colorful and perhaps pandering advertisements announcing some other candidates efforts to be elected to various posts but the announcements by Leblanc like much of his life were characterized by a simple and straightforward manner.

I hereby announce myself as a ‘candidate.’for the House of Representatives from the Parish of Vermilion subject to the Democratic primary of 1924. Your vote and support is respectfully solicited. Dudley J. Leblanc

–

I hereby, announce myself as a candidate for the House of Representatives from the Parish of Vermilion subject to the Democratic primary of 1924. Your vote and support is respectfully solicited. Dudley J. LeBlanc

Dudley Leblanc did not take long to become involved in controversy as a representative in the state legislature. His Leblanc Warehousing Bill was an effort to attack a host of ills and was much supported and much opposed and fully controverted and the storm of controversy seems to have not made any dent in the resolutions of this very new political figure.Cliipings were passed around the local papers more in those days and a great deal of recopying of letters, editorials and press releases occurred in relation to all this. Rice millers organized to oppose his bill and the efforts with it to increase the rights and security of farmers. “We are in receipt of a communication from Mr. H I. Gueydan, of Crowley, also forwarded to Mr LeBlanc, vigorously protesting against the Warehouse Bill introduced by Mr. Le Blanc in the present session of the State Legislature. The clipping from The Acadian …. we it are reproducing m this issue,” A sort of semi editorial in the Meridional would begin that way. At another point the Meridional would report: “This is the letter of Mr. Gueydan to the Meridional, and Mr. LeBlanc in regard to the bill. Personally we know very Iittle about the matter….” The local press seemed overall to have started off fairly certain that Dudley Leblanc would fail to sustain his solidarity with the Rice farmers in the face of the organized opposition he met. The fact that other states were using similar provisions did not persuade opponents that his concepts would prevail. Probably some of them were motivated and formed in their thoughts by hatred and contempt for Cajuns who predominated among rice farmers but the language was tempered and a name that was at least somewhat local and French was usually attached to opposition propaganda. An example of a letter printed in those days is excerpted here: “Mr. LeBlanc points out that certain similar laws have been in existence in various other states for a number of years where what is pursued in this bill has proved advantageous to the farmers. Questions have arisen as to the the similarity of those laws with the bill presented by Mr. LeBlanc and also to the amount of good they have accomplished. .We are convinced, however that the State should operate with as few commissions os possible… .we are fast drifting into a condition amounting to government by commission. There is the possibility of a commission of this sort becoming so well ‘set’ as to work a vast amount of harm, and. bid defiance to those who would seek to dislodge it. And if the farmer ultimately pays the bill for this warehouse service will his condition be bettered to any perceptible degree? … As Mr. LeBlanc has so ably pointed out, our present system is beset with many evils, at a minimum: Farmers at times suffer rank injustice in the disposal or their rice, but is it true that the bill proposed would remedy all this—or would it make matters worse? All we can do is to hope and pray that the right will prevail. We are sure of one thing and that Is that Mr. LeBlanc has the interest of the farmer at heart, that it is his honest belief that this bill will work to their benefit. I am convinced that this Bill would work farther expenses on the rice farmer, and would be a Godsend to rice graders. Mr. Dudley LeBlanc would hurt the very ones he wishes to benefit. … There is a fair amount of the most offensive forms of condescension in the tone of this letter. But Leblanc would not in this or any other significant instance be pushed aside by people who perhaps held him in low regard at least partly because of his ethnicity

The Meridional reported some of the efforts to oppose Leblanc. Politics were fierce even when they were not corrupt and violent:

VIGOROUS PROTEST IS RAISED BY LOCAL RICE MEN OVER LEBLANC BILL

Local Warehousemen United in Meeting. to Kill the Bill; Other Crowley men joined Mr. H. L. Gueydan today in the vigorous fight against the warehousing bill introduced by .Representative Dudley J. LeBlanc of Vermilion Parish, creating a new commission and requiring every public rice warehouse to furnish a public rice grader at a salary of not under $150.00 and which would force each warehouse to pay a license fee of $10 annually for every two feet of floor space, payable in advance and also other objectionable requirements of the LeBlanc Warehouse Bill.

Dudley LeBlanc responded articulately in my opinion and his struggle is real but not excessively confrontational in tone or manner: Elsewhere his words appear as follows

“It s not my intent to hope for radical change nor is it my intention to have the Legislature enact laws that will prove detrimental to some of our business interests. I would certainly prefer not to make any enemies, but I fail to understand how men who are supposed to be interested in the rice industry can conscientiously say- that such a measure would hurt the rice farmers “In some of the country papers in the rice district, there is now some opposition but this opposition comes from the mouthpieces of corporate interests. Some have seen fit to criticize the minor details of this measure and have •endeavored to make it appear that it would work against the interest of the rice farmer Every Insignificant detail can be worked out satisfactorilv to me. provided, of course, that the principle of the Bill is left intact and that the measure carries with it a degree of relief to our poor oppressed rice producers “It is estimated, as a matter, of explanation, that the total amount of money to be expended bv a rice producer would be five cents a sack of 200 pounds in order to obtain this rice. There is no additional expense entailed — neither on the Parish nor on the State and neither the warehouseman nor the rice mill would he called upon to put out any money since this five cents per sack would cover the entire expense. Every intelligent person realizes that due to the fact that many of our farmers are uneducated, They are not in a position to market their product’ intelligently. This Bill provides the proper assistance and enables the farmer to market his product in a similar position with the grain grower in other grain growing states.”.

Over various issues of several local papers Leblanc made his case and explained what the Bill did and did not required. Here are some of his words: “It requires every warehouse to be licensed and bonded and to furnish a public fee grade for a length of time after it is stored in said warehouse. It requires the warehouseman to issue a reliable receipt showing the exact grade or quality of his rice with the percentage of each grade or quality to the farmer storing his rice on each trip to the rice grader — appointed by the created Commission will by this new measure enable the farmer to know exactly the grade and quality of his products and with this knowledge, he will be in a better position to sell his rice. This will eliminate the possibilities of the big man using undue influence and will help the regular fellow. In the event that the farmer wants to obtain a little loan on the crop to deal with corresponding expenses and does not want to sell it at that particular time, a receipt can serve as security for the stated amount of sale to get a loan through any bank…..”

The fact is that whether in helping to create the State Park system, build his business or interact with Robert Flaherty as with his opposition to Huey Long Dudley Leblanc was a deeply devoted ethnic Cajun. He however used the term Acadian almost exclusively. We will return to other aspects of his life before reaching the end of this text and have already discussed him before but it is important to know what he meant to the Abbeville in which the SONJ folks centered their work in Acadiana. He described his early service as a State Representative: “During my campaign for member of the House of Representatives I made certain political pledges to my people which I have endeavored to faithfully keep; My people are to a certain extent very much oppressed. The Parish of Vermilion is an agricultural parish and the farmers have expected this administration to give them some relief. I have endeavored to the best of my ability to enact laws and which would carry to the aggrieved farmers some degree …”

Dudley and Evelyn were building all aspects of the Cajun ideal of leadership and that meant growing a family in March 14, 1925 a birth announcement for their son appeared in the Meridional. Nine years later the little boy is in the papers again for a festive occurrence called the

“Queen of Hearts” at Mount Carmel Elementary School where Dudley J. Leblanc Junior received a second prize reported in the Meridional. February 17, 1934… He also played golf with neighbors of all ethnicities among whites and in at least one tournament the honorable Dudley J. Leblanc, who on the course was just “Dudley”, took second honors.

These are mere glimpses into the life of Dudley Leblanc. The influence he had in the region had not declined substantially by the mid 1940s. He had never successfully organized the trappers around himself across South Louisiana and by the time Harnett Kane’s book came out they had lost several struggles especially in the southeastern section of the State. Flaherty and Standard Oil could possibly see them benefiting from the coming of the oil industry. But Dudley Leblanc’s rice farmers would benefit far more often than the trappers as more of them had more land in most cases. While the last chapter was the lion’s share of the reportage on the film Louisiana Story this chapter is a tiny sampling the reportage on the story told by Dudley Leblanc for and about the people of his part of Louisiana especially. It was Harnett Kane and not Dudley Leblanc whom the documentarians were predisposed to pay attention to in covering the Cajuns. Dudley Leblanc had established himself as a voice for the Cajuns in all the ways described in earlier chapter and in countless ways vaguely suggested in this chapter. But it was not his voice that those who had the privilege of informing mainstream America were likely to seek out. Kane was a better man and a better writer than many, but the reliance on his text to the exclusion of Dudley Leblanc’s point of view is inexcusable. Only Flaherty really absorbs some of it and barely gets some credit here for that. The business of American understanding has its own shame and corrupt inner processes even as it has been known for exposing corruption and insider dealing elsewhere in American society. Leblanc could have contributed a lot more to the discussion in the FSA documentary period and in the SONJ period. To evaluate documentaries and reporting I think an historian must consider what they leave out and under represent as well as what they do shot, write, publish and exhibit…

This posting of this chapter raises a few issues for me. Not the least of these issues is that Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen are still not ready to be posted and chapter fourteen will be ready before Chapter Thirteen. So my little serialization system is about to experience some more strain than it already has. Secondly it is time to post a few more bits of accompanying information for those who are not reading this right now but may in one of the unpredictable future upswings in readership which this blog occasionally enjoys. Below is a map to more or less remind or inform people of what the Acaidana region is.

More or less what Acadiana means to those who do not know…

But this post brings up more than this map relates to — at least directly. Here below is one of my grandmother’s pictures of a period before the film premiere and painted long after the film premiere. But it does address issues of cultural relevance and give a little more context to the discussion.

My great grandmother painted glimpses of Cajun life — this is one of those.

So we come to a chapter that shows how the local community responded to the premiere of Louisiana Story. I hope that it is informative and entertaining to at least some reader and a bit more to an even smaller set of people.

This is a glimpse of how the black and white film was presented to the world. The local papers ran black and white promotional and reporting spreads.

The previous chapter tried to see the premiere of Louisiana Story in the context of history and in the relevance it has to our own times. In doing so a few liberties were taken with the normal conventions for an historical narrative. There was no premiere at the Frank’s. The premiere was held at the Dixie which in time became the Frank’s Theater. It was not held in 1948 which is the official date of release but early in 1949. The two chapters are meant to illustrate also the problems with what I call folkloristic evidence. There is no doubt that people not old enough to be there who do have a memory — in the folklorisitic sense — of the film remember it being at the Frank’s in 1948. There are some who have better data and some worse. But such memories are not rendered entirely worthless. The building known as the Frank’s today is indeed the spot and 1948 is the place to find the film on most lists arranged by year. This chapter seeks to look at the premiere of the film as it was viewed and understood at the time, also to provide a kind of plain and straightforward narrative history of the film as it was perceived although not in great detail nor exhaustively. It does not seek to apologize for the fact that it has been perceived through an evolving lens. It only seeks to balance that view with one more restricted to the known responses of people to the film at the time. It especially looks at the response of local journalists and the interviews they did with local people whose own words about the film have not appeared much in this text so far. This work of history is obviously more personal than most works of academic history and the people and places make up a framework of the writer’s life. In addition, the time and delays involved in the production of the text give it a certain quality of intimacy that may not be ideal but cannot be avoided. My own experience with the Abbeville Meridional newspaper is very extensive — I have been featured in it, read it and been employed by it on far too many occasions to discuss here. That is for the reader to bear in mind. Clearly, I think that a great deal of academic objectivity is brought to all the varied sources relied upon by this text and to the questions raised in pursuing its arguments and narrative. But the reader will have to evaluate that for him or herself.

The masthead under which the coverage appeared was different than than of today but similar and familiar as well. Today’s masthead states that the paper is “The Voice of Vermilion Parish, The Most Cajun Place on Earth”. In those days it merely said: “ABBEVILLE MERIDIONALOLDEST CONTINUOUS BUSINESS IN VERMILION PARISH ABBEVILLE, LOUISIANA, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 1949 LEADING NEWSPAPER OF VERMILION PARISH SINOE 1856 NO; 8 “

There were two articles on the front page in that issue but deeper inside was an extravagant full page pictorial spread that told readers it would be at the Dixie Theater from the next day, Sunday, February 20, 1949 to the following Thursday. The newspaper also had a regular advertisement for its films which showed too mainstream films playing as a double feature on Friday and Saturday which were its biggest money making days. That same advertisement did however give the “Southern Premiere” of Louisiana Story bigger billing than either of the other two films. But in addition to being extravagant for such a spread in this particular paper it has the following telling lines on the side among others:|

Showing In The South A GEM! Abbeville has been chosen as the “Premiere City for this great film, LOUISIANA STORY, because it was filmed here and stars Vermilion Parish people. It’s- film is the everyday story your friends and your relatives.

The pictorial spread shows review snippets from the New York Times, Life Magazine and other sources. The celebration of the film as everyday life is very telling. It is not clear if the writer of those lines had seen the film but it has some significance in any case. It was a Saturday issue and in Louisiana to be classified as a daily one need only publish five papers a week. That is what the Meridional has done for a while including at the time of this writing. Today there is no Saturday or Monday issue but in those days the Saturday issue came out regularly and this was one of those issues. There were at least two articles about the film on the first page and may have been a mention elsewhere that has escaped my research.

The first and more background oriented article begins; with a montage of photographs described as follows:

Filmed entirely in the marshes of Vermilion, Iberia and Lafayette parishes, “Louisiana Story” has as its stars Joseph Boudreaux of Cameron parish and Lionel LeBlanc of Abbeville. Scenes reproduced from the picture show Mr. LeBlanc, above, looking into the sky, Joseph talking with Frank Hardy, an oil worker, left, and fondling his pet raccoon, top left.

This little detail is significant because photo essays are expensive and time-consuming for small community papers and this would not be the last to be placed in the paper related to this film. This article goes on:

Louisiana Story’s Lionel LeBlanc — Abbeville’s own movie star, came to our office Tuesday, sat down in our chair and told us how much he enjoyed making “Louisiana Story”. “It’s too bad we didn’t meet 20 years ago,” he quoted Producer-Director Robert Flaherty as telling him, “because we could have done great things together.” LeBlanc, who is now 65 years old and .’almost* past the times when he could spend days and days bogging through the marsh country, says that, despite his age, he didn’t find the filming of the story, too rigorous a job “Times have changed since I first went into the marshes. Then it ‘was work to kill an alligator, but now my four sons, all of whom are trappers, can drive their boats with ‘motor paddles’ right up to where the ‘gator is,” the Louisiana Story actor remembers. “Then all they have to do is shoot him and drag him into the boat.”

The personal tone is typical perhaps of Southern rural newspapers and even small American newspapers but it is especially true of the Cajun rural community press. The story about how much harder life was when he was young than it is for the pampered trappers of the modern era is also an old Cajun tradition which resonates no doubt among cowboys, loggers and lobstermen of other American rural ethnicities. The article continues to let the reader get to know more about this man lifted to the movie screens which Cajuns generally liked and admired.

LeBlanc killed his last alligator 10 years ago. He now handles E. A. Mcllhenny’s trapping ranch • and has been doing that work for 20 years. It was through Mr. Mcllhenny that Mr. LeBlanc was discovered by the film producer. He reports that Mr. Flaherty asked the fur ranch owner where he could find a man who knew the marshes and who looked like and was a fur trapper, Abbeville’s star, whose home is on Maude Avenue, remembers one bad experience during the filming of the movie.

In the days of the film Abbeville had racial segregation of housing. Today Maude Avenue is made up of some white families, some Vietnamese families and is largely an African- American (with the distinct cultural mix that still exists to a fading degree among African Americans in Acadiana) middle class neighborhood. In those days it was a neighborhood of the prosperous white working class. Nothing fancy but a good place to live from which a daughter or son might contend for a place in what economically based social strata existed in the parish not as an equal but above a few other neighborhoods in a town which did note such things. After this implied bit of social introduction and orientation as to who Lionel Leblanc is in the community, the Meridional gives a brief passage a chance to relate the worlds of trapping and movie-making as they coexist in this new moment of history. Here it is worth repeating the last half of the last sentence.

… Abbeville’s star, whose home is on Maude Avenue, remembers one bad experience during the filming of the movie.

He and a crew of others went out into the marshes on a “marsh buggy” which bogged down. LeBlanc and the crew had to walk several miles to get out of the swamp. Mr. LeBlanc smiles as he remembers that the producer, who is about 65, wanted to make the trip with them. With his knowledge of the danger in the swamp and the weaknesses of all man-made attempts to tame the swamps, he adds that “Mr. Flaherty might not have gotten out because you have to know how to ‘walk the marshes’ “.

Walking the marshes is no joke. Harnett T. Kane has a passage in his influential book in these projects about walking what I was raised to call Flotant and there so many risks they literally could fill a chapter very neatly. The marshes and swamps are beautiful and abundant but they offer more risks than a stranger can usually even properly imagine. Flaherty of course was no ordinary stranger but a man who had put new lands into the world’s maps. Yet the trapper, who clearly liked Flaherty just fine knows the man was not ready for that environment in the time of preparation allowed in a shooting schedule. Trappers walk the marsh — almost nobody else does. Native Americans rarely did and more as proof of manliness under grave risk than as a livelihood. Hunters, fishermen, ranchers and oilmen may boast of having done so a few times now and then and they do so usually with a lot of bravado in the telling. But for the true trapper it is a matter of daily life and daily bread. The Meridional knows that many of the parish’s young people of greater advantages would in many cases dream of being movie stars and they have catered to such interests in varied ways over decades. Therefore, they explore what the unlikely local hero of the glamorous industry has to say about life on film.

When asked if he intended continuing in the movies, Mr. LeBlanc said, an emphatic “no”. He says that he will continue to trap however, in this, however, he also is a bit discouraged. “Trapping isn’t as good now as it was. This season I have seen many go into the marshes and come out with their expenses on their backs.” But, at 65, he has the right to ‘hibernate’ at his home on Maude Avenue, and bask in his glory. There aren’t many who can become full-fledged movie stars after spending 64 years in the marshes of Louisiana.

There is a whole fabric of social cues in this brief article which cannot be spelled out without making too much of them but which the reader may be able to speculate upon after reading this text. The next article on the front page serves as an interesting framework and foundation for better understanding an earlier chapter about “Cajun Works”. Remember that the film industry has become rooted in this small place of small enterprises and the newspaper coverage shows that this work was begun as people took every advantage they could of the possible opportunities to make the moviemakers feel connected and welcome in this place. The next article is about the premiere itself. It is reproduced in full below as it appeared.

Throngs Are Expected For Southern Premiere

The first premiere in the history of Abbeville will be held Sunday when “Louisiana Story,” a film depicting the encroachment of modern industry over trie fur trapper in his native marshes, opens here. State officials, representatives from nearby towns, stars of the film, representatives of the state press and a contingent from Life magazine

Robert Flaherty, producer and director, with his staff, will arrive by plane Friday and will remain through Sunday. Invitations have been extended to Governor Earl K. Long, the directors of various state departments, Mayor Delesseps Morrison, the mayors of Lafayette, New Iberia, and Crowley and to others. The film, which has been awarded several prizes for its excellence, was produced by Robert Flaherty under a grant from a major oil company. The veteran producer spent 14 months making it and maintained his headquarters at the Mettles home in Abbeville.

He picked the stars from the surrounding territory, Lionel LeBlanc, who lives on Maude avenue and is employed by E. A. Mcllhenny, was selected to play the part of the father in the film. Joseph Boudreaux, a native of Cameron parish, was cast in the roll of the son. It is around him and his experiences with the members of the oil company crew that is the basis for the story. But the film is more than the story of the boy and the oil country —it is the story of the adventure and the intrigue of bayou swamps, the marshes. The film was shot in the natural surrounding and depicts the marshes as they are. The ‘characters in the film are real, too. They are the trappers who have lived for generations on the bayous and have learned their ways of trapping the muskrat and mink from their fathers and grandfathers. Even the oil company men are taken from real life, many of them being brought Abbeville from the different locations at which they are now working. Joseph Boudreaux, Lionel Le Blanc, Mrs. Evelyn Bienvenu, and Frank Hardy are coming for the premiere. The Chamber of Commerce and Civic organisations, along with the Abbeville Women’s Club, are planning to entertain Mr. Flaherty and the out-of-town visitors.. ,

The occasion is clearly anticipated as a major event in the small town. It is also true that not everyone is presumed to have been very closely following the production of the film prior to that point. Had the film been well covered in the Meridional prior to this front page coverage? The local paper certainly gives some indication of how the film crew were received.

Flaherty had received favorable press in the newspaper back in the 1930’s for Elephant Boy made in India and the admiring reviewer also lauded the earlier Man of Aran when he praised this film. All of this preceded his coming to Abbeville or having any plans to do so for that matter. On Saturday July 12, 1947 the following piece appeared in the Meridional as reproduced below:

Film Production Unit Shoot 250,000 Feet Near Abbeville

Shooting schedules of “Louisiana Boy”, a feature motion picture with a southwestern Louisiana background, were completed this week and the company of Robert Flaherty Productions from New York’ were preparing to head north again to complete technical finishing afj the 250,-000 feet of film made here. Flaherty, discoverer of Sabu; the Indian youngster who rose to stardom in “Elephant Boy” and other films, stated that he had spent approximately three months looking for a native Acadian’ boy to use as a star in the production, finally finding J. C. Boudreaux of Cameron, Louisiana on a lucky hunch by Mrs. Flaherty. Other native characters were found to fill supporting roles. Including Lionel. LeBlanc of Abbeville, well known trapper and fisherman of Vermilion Parish, where most of the scenes were laid. The film depicts the life of a ‘youngster of the Louisiana , marshes, and the change brought when the barge derricks of “oil survey crews begin to probe into the remote fastnesses of the swamp. The film shows many scenes of the lonely grandeur of the marshlands, and records the sounds of its amphibious Wildlife. Flaherty said that title ‘Louisiana Boy” was purely a working title, and that the film would probably appear under another name when released sometime in November 1947.

There may have been a bit more coverage of the filming process but not so very much more. The film was not as big of an event as the premiere. Some films had been made in part in the region but a film premiere was unheard of and was received with a very warm welcome. The Saturday, February 26, 1949 running mostly in ENglish had a full page pictorial coverage of the premiere. It ran under the banner:

SATURDAY FEBRUARY 26, 1949 THE ABBEVILLE MERIDIONAL as usual and then in French Vien ici ~~ mon Petit Salo-pri . The words loosely indicate that a call had come out to display Acadian heritage and that the people had responded. The chief manifestation was the much photographed buggy parade. The central brief article in this pictorial was as is reproduced below:

They ‘hooked ole Dobbin to the shay’ last week and came to Abbeville to stage the now famous “Buggy Parade*’ to the Dixie Theater for the Southern Premiere of the movie “Louisiana Story.” Mr. and Mrs. Ulysse Hebert came in from Maurice in their buggy to lead the parade. They followed behind Police Officer Howard Guidry and Happy Flats the hillbilly singer, and a member of his band. Representatives from Life Magazine, from Time Magazine, from Harper’s Brothers Publishing company, and many local photographers started taking pictures and they couldn’t stop. When the buggies were unloaded and the crowd had filed into the theater, there had been more pictures taken in Abbeville than in any other one day in History. Uncle Nick Broussard of Erath, who traveled “many a mile in a buggy, arrived just in time to join the parade as it was going into it’s last lap. Co-chairmen of the parade were Corbette LeBlanc and Ernest Trahan of Maurice.

The future Buggy parades of Church Point may have owed something to this precedent and the totality of the event was clearly in the realm that has earned Cajuns a reputation for exuberant celebration among many Americans. However, to a Cajun there are other aspects to this story than mere exhilaration and the coming together in this way seems suitable to the event. Nonetheless, it was clearly a big event that would long be remembered in the town.

What could be gleaned from the local press about the way the film itself was remembered and appreciated as a final complete work viewed and remembered? Here again it is useful to work through the limited text that exists in its complete totality. The March 5. 1949 article incorrectly names Frances Parkinson Keyes as Evelyn and has a few other problems typical of the overworked and understaffed quality of small papers. For while big city papers may have more pressure they also have more resources and so careless errors are ferreted out that a local rural writer carries into eternity on every piece even when they are not added in by other careless errors. The errors are as much the result of cares in many cases as they are of carelessness.

LOUISIANA STORY—A REVIEW Premiere Film Uses New Technique To Tell Story Of State Marshes

By Gene Yoes, Jr.

“Louisiana Story”, the great documentary film about the marshes ‘ of Louisiana and of Vermilion parish has come and gone. Behind it, it leaves some who did not appreciate the picture But the vast majority of those who saw the stirring film acclaim it as magnificent “Louisiana Story” is the recital of ‘ the life of an Acadian fur trapper’s son—told through the all-seeing eyes of a camera It is a true to life story, a story that is happening every day in the marshes at our back door It shows the fur trapper’s son, played by young Boudreaux, as a child of nature almost untouched by the synthetic mechanized world we live in.

But, as the story develops, we see this child’s playground, the marshes, invaded by an oil exploration crew. We see the ordinary calm of his life, at first, disturbed, later altered, by the man-made machinery.’ Then, the oil company leaves. Left behind is a child who feels empty because of its departure!, but a child who very easily slips back into his normal, everyday way of life. Two of the most magnificent sequences in the film were presented without the use of words—a technique that is new, and many times as powerful as the shopworn phrases of Hollywood. After the oil well had “blown out” with dangerous underground gas and. water, the crew was waiting! for orders to move to another location The child, in his desire to keep his newly found friends from leaving, poured the contents of his evil-spirit-chasing-salt into the well to remove the “hex” that was causing the well to “blow out”. This dramatically demonstrated the change in the child, his acceptance of this new mode of life. In the other sequence, the child was fondling his new rifle that his father had bought in the city. His pet raccoon, which he thought had been devoured by the alligator, returned. The child dropped his new rifle, and went to his coon. “Told” without the use of dialogue, this sequence powerfully shows the child as he rejects the mechanized world, the artificial world created by machinery, and returns to his native environment, to his native way of living. Some have said that the film gives a “bad impression” of this area of Louisiana, that it presents this area as a large swamp. But, we think that they may have missed the point of the story. At the beginning of the film, it is implicitly stated that the movie was made in one particular locale, Bayou Petit Anse.

It is true that the people of the Northern part of the United States may believe that all of Louisiana is a swamp. “Louisiana Story” will not change their opinion—no amount of films or stories can change them. But, after seeing this film, we are sure that the occupant of a penthouse on the richest ground in New York would gladly exchange his property for the property of John La-tour or any property in the marshes of Louisiana that are capable of spouting black, liquid gold. Robert Flaherty’s product was not an ordinary film—it was not’ made with the flourish that is typical of Hollywood films. For its locale, the producer picked the area around Bayou Petite Anse in Vermilion parish. For its star, Flaherty picked native Acadians—Lionel LeBlanc of Abbeville, Joseph Carl Boudreaux of Little Pecan Island.

The cost of the film was less than one-fourth that of a Hollywood production—but the film has been acclaimed as great by the New York Times, New York Post, New York Mirror, Harper’s Magazine, the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald-Tribune, Life and Star. And the comments of many of those who saw the film here—Miss Evelyn Parkinson Keyes, (noted author), W. B. Cotten, Jr., (Baton Rouge), F. A. Godchaux, Sr., Mr. and Mrs. W. B. MacMillan, Mr. and Mrs. Matt Vernon (Daily Iberian), President and Mrs. Joel Fletcher of Southwestem Louisiana Institute, and many others echoed those reviews.

Boudreaux’s family had moved for Cameron to Little Pecan Island while he was making the film. He used the thousands of dollars he earned to buy the family a set of propane powered appliances. Later he would continue to hunt alligators but would not be in films other than Louisiana Story; The Reverse Angle as himself. Beyond that, one who has read up to this point should not need much explanation to follow this review. An opinion can be formed of how Southern, Cajun and rural American identity are interrelated in the minds of various people.

One of the questions in a book like this is whether a book mostly without presidents, armies and stacks of dead bodies deserves really to be an academic history at all. For this book aspires to a serious record of this film and these photographs and the people about whom they were made. But the fact of the lives of the actors does raise a question, if history is to really cover such apparently ordinary lives can it be history in the same way that a history of commanders in World War II is American history? The trivial details set in the Battle for Gettysburg are one thing, but should history take cognizance of the trivial details of daily life? That is the question which led me to show in earlier chapters all the ways I believe Cajun significance has been unfairly diminished in our history. If they deserve (or we deserve) real historical recognition then it will consist largely of ordinary people and events being described in stories of special significance. Not every story can be significant history and have those words mean much. But where the significant stories are Cajun the ordinary will usually predominate as a mode of experience.

The ordinary is a trait of Cajun and Acadian culture more than of most places. There is an extraordinary ordinariness about life among these people in some ways. Even those to whom they are very exotic note this as well. In that ordinary life things that are real and useful are seldom wasted. The premiere had much to offer the people of the region in terms of support for memory and recollection. A March 12, 1949 issue of the Meridional had this something still to say. It is reproduced in full on the following page

BUGGY PARADE’ FILM HAS FIRST SHOWING

On Monday night at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lionel LeBIanc, a film of the “Boggy Parade” was presented by Charles Nunes. The movie was made during the pre-premiere festivities of the “Louisiana Story” which had its Southern premiere here three weeks ago. Lionel leBlanc, a native of Abbeville, played one of the leading roles in the movie. He was chosen to play in the film because of his knowledge of the Southeast marshes. The “Buggy Parade” movie was made by Mr. Nunes from the sidewalk awning of the Audrey Hotel and from in front of the Dixie theater where “Louisiana 8tory” was shown. Attending the showing were Mr. Nunez, Mr. and Mrs. LeBIanc, Mr. and Mrs. Minos LeBIanc, Mr. and Mrs. .Gene-Yoes, as well as several children.

We will return before the last words of the conclusion to other written responses to this film among the Cajun people and the people of Abbeville. But in this brief chapter the bulk of the Meridional’s published response to the events related to the entire series of events related to the SONJ cinematic invasion has been reproduced. The photographs are not here and add a great deal. The struggle of different Americans to correctly perceive and understand one another is illustrated in these relatively few words. Not the only local paper to discuss these events the Meridional still deserves a chapter of its own. They give us the record not necessarily of the premiere at the Dixie as it was in any absolute sense as perhaps this chapter title might suggest — but at least how the film’s premiere was perceived in town and in the Parish as a whole at the time.

In segregating this particular source here I both show respect and a kind of mistrust. Community journalism has very real limits and shortcomings. I choose to expose the reader to this voice after having said some other things. Likewise differences in my perspective and those in these articles are more clearly and I think fairly illustrated when the words are joined into a single compelling voice for whatever perspective the local newspaper represents.

This is one of the posts which is very different from the way things would be if this were and actual book. If this were a proper book with an actual promotions budget which most readers had bought in advance or at least borrowed from a library that had bought it then I could let this chapter stand without mentioning the next chapter. But in this case I know that only a few readers are reading this text directly from the site at this time. A good portion of those few readers are reading as the texts appear in these blog posts. So it may be that some are relative experts on the local scene. If you are don’t get discouraged by possible inacuracies or near inaccuracies in this chapter’s account of the premiere of Louisiana Story. The next chapter is a near companion piece and the two together make one more or less complete telling of the story of the long remembered premiere.

new courthouse clock going up in Abbeville…at the time of my last post…

The town has a life, a memory and a folklore, this book is in a sense a part of that as well. In the conclusion there will be more mention of yet another view of the premiere that has become part of our heritage and reality. But in terms of this event, these two chapters should make things right in themselves.

The St. Mary Magdalene Catholic Church Where I was baptized, made my First Communion and was wed.

I am typing this post at the Vermilion Parish Library Main Branch, also the Abbeville Branch which stands at the site of the Old Palms hospital. I wrote and article and took pictures and collected pictures for Bonnes Nouvelles describing both the library and the Palms and how these two histories come together. In that story there were multiple points of view and multiple perspectives.that is the way history and time works its way out in our world. The Premiere discussed here was in a sense celebrated as a key event in Abbeville’s sesquicentennial. That telling is the one highlighted in the conclusion.

Me in front of a Christmas lights nativity scene shot by one of the proprietors on my phone as I walked into the Donors Dinner.

But as I type this today, I simply urge the experts to accept what this chapter has to say but wait until the next chapter has been absorbed to come to a full judgement.

While most people who arrived at the premiere of Louisiana Story either walked from nearby or arrived in automobiles one is impressed by the horses and buggies hitched and posted around the Frank’s Theater in the images of the premiere. There is something about a horse and buggy being driven to a movie premiere that is in itself noteworthy. Movies and automobiles seem to come together on to the world stage and we expect them to stay together. In addition, there are no horses in Louisiana Story. Furthermore it was funded and largely produced by Standard Oil which depended on selling fuel for automobiles for much of its income. Horses as most readers will grasp consume very little gasoline. So the buggies at the premiere are worth a comment or two and there will be a few comments here about them.

However, the cars not in this picture were also part of this scene. Postwar Acadiana was everywhere changing even as it continued to be a place either backward or culturally conservative depending on one’s point of view. Or from this writer’s point of view a little bit of both. The world of the fictional Latour family was being affected by all sorts of change and some of it was of a more global nature and some of it was profoundly local.

Some might think that the life of a trapper remained much the same as long as the person remained a trapper but that is not necessarily the case. Trapping continues in Acadiana today. The same Nunez family that provided pelts and alligator skins for the film operates just such a business today. I spoke with them and took the photograph below in working on this draft of this text. There is no hitching post notable in front of the fur trading post in 2016. But there are places where horses could be hitched. Many alligator skins are farmed today, many come from the broad expanses of the Atchafalaya Swamp and then some do come from the harvest of alligators during the carefully managed hunting season. Alligator hunters discuss the decline of nutria populations in Vermilion Parish and the impact that has on alligators. But in 1948 nutria pelts were the up and coming source of revenue for trappers in the region. Trapping was a more mainstream and less controversial part of life in those days. Today we live in a world where trappers and fur traders are more defensive about their way of life than was the case in those days.

The world depicted in the somewhat arranged swamp and marsh scenes in Louisiana Story had been changing in the years since the first camera had taken the first pre-production shots for the film had been taken. In the January 23, 1947 issue of the Jeff Davis Parish News there was coverage of a report to the Kiwanis Club. Earl Atwood of Lake Arthur was an employee United States Department of the Interior in its Department of Fish and WIldlife. The man was speaking about the growing importance of the species called coypu and nutria variously. In the 1945 to 1946 season the nutria pelt on the coypu held the sixth place in the number of pelts taken in Louisiana went to the more or less invasive species at 8,784 pelts in the trapping season. But according to Atwood the following season had led to an improvement in the rank of the number of pelts taken to fifth place and the market allowed those pelts to take fourth place in total money value for a species of fur-bearing animal. The nutria (as it is almost always called in Louisiana) had some impact on plague of invasive water hyacinths. Those were promising results for trappers oilmen and anyone else struggling to keep rural waterways open in those days.

In the January 18, 1945 issue of the Jeff Davis Parish News there had been reporting of the shutting down of camps which provided German prisoners of war as local farm labor to area farmers. Four hundred hostile soldiers in that camp had then been returned to Camp Polk. The same process occurred elsewhere in Acadiana and Southwest Louisiana. The fabric of rural life no longer featured these exotic features. America’s own veterans returned to seek out a path forward in this as in many other parts of rural America. The oil industry would play a large role in forming the economic structure of rural Acadiana and its fringes from the very moment the war ended. Abbeville was a little East of Jeff Davis Parish and Iberia Parish was East of Abbeville But trapping farming and the oil industry were affected by these same very specific factors that got little national attention. People cared a good bit about nutria and hyacinths and German POW farm labor. By 1948 the nutria had abated the worst of the hyacinth crisis despite it continuing negative effects to this day. By 1948 POWs were gone and for all practical purposes all the troops were home who would be coming home. Abbeville where the film would premiere was a postwar town in the definable postwar era locally and nationally.

The postwar era if defined in almost any way that one might define it would not end in 1953. The year 1953 is chosen as the end of the period which is the direct focus of this study because it is the last year in which the Standard Oil of New Jersey documentary projects were working in Postwar Acadiana. Actually the date may be imperfect even for that standard but it is suggested by many of the most important and highly accessible sources. When this narrative arrives at the end of the year 1953 we just more or less magically stop without apology. But the postwar reality which had begun to take shape in 1945 was in full swing in 1948 when the film Robert Flaherty had made was exhibited at the Frank’s Theater in Abbeville. The idea of a postwar era involves two smaller ideas forming a single complete idea. The idea is first that the war has ended and that is pretty well established in the case of World War Two to a higher and more certain degree than is the case with most wars. The second part of the realization of a postwar reality is the realization that the society, community, region and people being described as postwar entities are not merely the same as they were before the war. Rather they are somehow at least significantly transformed by having passed through the war. Louisiana Story was and is, I believe, a truly postwar film. That reality is essential to all that it is. It has a great deal to say about a new stage for the oil industry and for the Cajun people and for the region after the end of the Second World War. The transformations that had occurred during the war years were at a worldwide, a national and at smaller scales. Some of the transformations were directly related to the war, some were indirectly related and some were coincidental. But all of these transformations came together to create a single reality. That reality is what we have been describing as Postwar Acadiana.

The house on Main Street had settled back into its existence as something other than a place to make movies. Robert and Frances Flaherty had completed their last real collaboration on the full and complete work of making a movie. His filmography was not yet complete but the last film would be an editing and reworking of an existing film far more than anything else. Louisiana Story had really brought their lives as married filmmakers to a close. They had been busy promoting the film before its premiere and after the last edit and would continue in that mode for a while. Their agent and principal publicist for Flaherty productions always felt they were not getting enough money for the film in various deals they made with exhibitors and distributors. The Flahertys had been paid all along, they did not have to share any of the current and future proceeds with Standard Oil and they had been able to keep a film unit together under their command for a reasonably long time. People do and don’t become very rich for real reasons, in some ways it is not so different than having a talent for sports or music. The Flaherty’s had lived well, had made a movie that they were proud of, had built a further basis for their legacy, had unique ties to a major industry. It is really not surprising that they were not in the mood or of the mind to drive hard bargains for the money to be paid by exhibitors and distributors.

In the few years since the surrender of Japan on the ship in the waters joining the vast and far off Pacific Ocean life had changed on the Gulf Coast of the United States of America. Abbeville, Acadiana and the rest of America had decisively and clearly moved from the wartime to the postwar American experience. While things were not yet as they would be in 1953 they were well on their way to that exact configuration of American life and society. The good and the bad of a really postwar way of life was making itself felt. The Louisiana Maneuvers which had trained so many men and some women for service in the U.S. Military during the Big One had involved an element of involvement by several colleges and universities in Louisiana. The funding and resources that came into the region at that time helped to remake Southwestern Louisiana Institute which was in Lafayette, Louisiana and now exists there as the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Abbeville is its own Parish Seat in Vermilion. New Iberia and Lafayette are each larger cities that have their own Parishes: Iberia and Lafayette respectively. Lafayette is to the North of Abbeville and New Iberia is to the East. At the time of Flaherty’s residence the cities had about an equal influence over the town and Avery Island where they and their SONJ photography visitors traveled most often was almost in New Iberia. But Lafayette was on the way to being the much greater influence and that is true now although New Iberia remains a very important neighboring seat of a neighboring parish.The postwar years brought back many men and a good number of women who had seen much of the world, achieved new skills and made more connections than they would have otherwises and all these factors contributed to dramatically accelerating the pace of life in south Louisiana. The oil business that SONJ was trying to promote and document was indeed growing rapidly, Lafayette which had already had SLI was emerging as a significant medical and financial center. Students and returned military service personnel would be among those attending the premiere of Louisiana Story.

Mr. Joel Lafayette Fletcher the former Dean of the College of Agriculture at SLI, became the president of this institution of higher learning in 1941 just before the years at the center of our study at the onset of U.S.becoming fully engaged in World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Not ignoring the draft it is also true that a huge number of people rushed off to volunteer out of reasons not so different than those which caused recruiting to reach new heights after the attacks of September 11, 2001. SLI had not had any really substantial military component to its institutions and so enrollment dropped both at very high rates and very suddenly. Fletcher had faced the prospect of presiding over the collapse of an institution starting with huge reductions in the number of faculty. Fletcher took action and with his academic vice president, Dr. Joseph Riehl, went to the nation’s capital and negotiated all that was necessary for the Navy to locate its V-12 and V-5 officer training programs at SLI. Among the results of all this change was the coming of recruits who were also athletes as All-Americans from many colleges transferred to SLI in Lafayette, Louisiana. As the SONJ film and photography projects were getting underway SLI won the first Oil Bowl in 1943 with these players. During the war years and early postwar years this same institution organized a College of Engineering. Some of it had a military component and a great deal of it would be about preparing engineer for the oil industry and is service sectors even when the engineers were not petroleum engineers as many would eventually be. When World War II ended the school was associated with the Oil Bowl, had served as a major part of the war effort and was ready to provide engineers for the oil industry The school realized a further advance because of the war when it purchased 108 units of veterans housing, buildings that became known as “Vet Village”. The tradition of military roles for schools that were not particularly military was well established in Acadiana. St. Charles College in Grand Coteau in St. Landry Parish was the first Jesuit College in the Southern United States. This school which combined a preparatory academy of high standards and an abbreviated University level curriculum was a key institution for the Cajun elite and others of means in the region during its tenure. It was where future Confederate General Alfred Mouton had studied before attending the US Military Academy at West Point, where future Louisiana Speaker of the House and District Judge Estilette studied before continuing on at Yale. It had been a site for an army student company and a military radio course during World War Two. However St. Charles had closed after a fire in the early 1920s and one more connection to the golden era of Cajun Americanism in the late 1830s and the 1840s was lost. By the time World War II came around a period of real marginalization had preceded the changes brought about by that conflict. The fictional Latours really represented that marginalization in a strong way but one that people could identify with fairly well. Their feelings about the portrayal and the realities it represented might be complex but almost nobody doubted that the oil industry offered the best chance forward for a culture and ethnic community that was not thriving economically to the degree it once had and which was showing other signs of strain. .

War of course is never off of the radar screen of the entire planet. The military cullture and the warlike conditions of the war years that had ended in 1945 and wrapped up in 1946 really had left a period of peace which was notable and profound in the Acadiana region. But there were seeds of the next war blooming and not all were oblivious to them. Yet it was already possible to guess that the next war would be huge and bloody but contained in the quiet and sense of restraint created by the unique Cold War conditions that were emerging. . Korea was to be the next place where many men and some women would serve under their country’s arms and some would die for these United States of America. Korea had been ruled by the Japanese Empire from 1910 and was one of the last foreign possessions rested from that dying and remade Empire in the 1945 and 1946 period when so much was happening around the world that defined the closing act on the real and bloody drama that was World War II. As part of that grand finale of struggle at a date later than many Americans would guess once this period faded into the past, that is in August 1945, the Soviet Union joined in on the great Pacific theater of the war as allowed by the defeat of Germany in its very belligerent form as the Third Reich and declared war on Japan. This Communist ally to the United States who was already becoming a potential adversary in Europe undertook these efforts with the understanding of the United States and by specific agreement with the United States occupied Korea north of the 38th parallel. After the first and only recorded events of atomic warfare and all else that was involved the U.S. forces subsequently occupied the south and integrated a rule of the region tied to the rebuilding of the Philippines and most of all Japan which had surrendered. By 1948 when Louisiana Story premiered at the Frank’s, two separate governments had been set up on opposite sides of the agreed line. According to what all parties saw as the state of international law both the government of the Soviet client state and the American client state believed the border dividing the country could not be permanent. Each of these countries claimed to be the legitimate government of Korea as a whole — with some willingness to consider accommodations of the other government’s claims and forms to some degree.. Cajuns like other American military personnel were already serving in a region offering signs of future conflict and a serious war at that. The Chinese Civil War was yet another strain in this growing symphony of tension and brewing violence likely to bring in the United States. But despite all of that this was a period of peace and hope in which the oil industry a path into the future and a new order distinctly different from the period before the Second World War or the period of that war. Louisiana Story was a good film for that sense of the likely trend of local events.

Postwar Acadiana was increasingly going to be an oil industry dominated Acadiana. Louisiana Story told a tale which many could relate to very well. It may not have been the story of very many lives directly in the sense that a tiny percentage of Cajuns or Acadiana residents were trappers and not such a large percentage were landowners who signed oil leases. Yet nonetheless the film was very relatable and relevant in that it showed the oil industry bringing in the promise of a new prosperity. That was in itself a hugely important theme of everyday life and daily conversations. When the film was exhibited it was not terribly hard to connect with local audiences. Horses and buggies and antique wagons nearly filled the town center as people chose to participate and show support for the event and the film that occasioned it. Cajuns were known for being the inhabitants of a part of the country where people kept their old buggies and related gear long after they had begun to rely on automobiles for daily transportation.

One of the realities of life in the Acadiana of the 1940s was that it was a society in which the horse which is absent from the film Louisiana Story still played an important role. The horse was still truly useful for working cattle and is still of some use in that regard. However, it had even more usefulness in other areas of life which focussed on ritual and recreation. Horses of course do not burn petroleum based fuels and that may explain why although they are not absent from the SONJ documentary projects they are very little represented there.

The role of Cajun quarter horse racing in shaping the cultural landscape is among the greatest realities in recreational life of the 1940s and fifties. The roots of these events and the impact they had on the larger world of quarter horse racing also revealed a number of realities within the evolving culture of Acadiana which addressed a set of circumstances that were in themselves due to change. The horse was a mode of transit on and between farms especially for young people when the family automobile and tractors were engaged in the business of farming. The word Cajun had by force of varied circumstances come to have multiple meanings even in the Acadiana region itself and some people grew up especially as white creoles with no blood ties or marital ties to the ethnic community and no grounding in its folklore or associations who believed that they were Cajuns because they spoke French and lived in Louisiana’s Acadiana region and were Catholics this was emphasized by the influence of the outside world calling all such people Cajuns in many newspaper and other media outlets. In addition the Cajuns did have many countless ties to the White Creoles in the community’s vicinity and were not eager to be too earnest in excluding them. The larger world began to associate many of the most rural and poorest people with being Cajun and very often those people were not at all Cajuns. In fact though poor and very rural Cajuns did exist they might or might not differ sharply from those held up as examples of the group by the incredibly misguided flounderings around of the mainstream consciousness. The Cajuns did really do a lot of ritual horseback riding and bring to the to the areas near the community many racing events and venues. So did some of their neighbors. But among other things the Cajun horseracing world was a form of employment for the most needy young boys and men and a handful of girls as well.

Much like trapping , jockeying offered a life at the edges of a society that was not all that likely to offer many opportunities. Some people made a really “excellent living” at trapping to use the term Helen Van Dongen used to describe Lionel Leblanc who portrayed the trapper Latour. Such people like Leblanc usually had a whole series of enterprises besides trapping to engage their energies and fill their hours or as in the case of Leblanc had a single job or regular position which allowed them to trap as well. A few became fur buyers and brokers and of those a few got rich rich. The abundance of the nutria, the rising market for furs in a world recovering from the austerity of war and many other factors contributed to the sense of hope that trappers had for prosperity. Into all this mix the oil industry in real life as in the film Louisiana Story offered a few new chances for a good livelihood. Even a new canal or a an improved waterway in the vast marshes could make the lives of some number of trappers substantially easier. It was also noted fairly early on that the alligator benefitted from the rise of the nutria population. The alligators also controlled what was already coming to be recognized as the real risks and dangers associated with a large nutria population. While the muskrat built a kind of artificial island nest and was a small animal the nutria was much bigger and burrowed into natural and man-made levees which joined with emerging oil activity to disrupt water and drainage patterns. This whole set of pressures on the marsh seemed to be creating more understanding of fur trapping and alligator hunting — both of which were often done by the same people as in the film. The sense of the way that these pressures would join with other emerging pressures to really challenge the fur trapping industry was not yet very manifest to everyone involved in the newly emerging economic situation in the marsh. People who might attend a premiere of a film in Abbeville were interested in fur trapping and felt as much connected to it almost as to the oil industry. Both industries were relevant to their daily lives.

The horse racing, breeding, cattle working and other industries of the Cajuns and of Acadian were significant. Throroughbreds get more attention for many reasons but in the world of quarter horses many prizes and titles were associated with this very unique section of a very rural environment. The world of major thoroughbred racing has continued to feel the impact of Acadian’s jockeys in recent decades as such greats as Calvin Borel, Shane Sellers , Randy Romero and Kent Desormeaux have created an almost incredible record in that more international, national and glamorous sport. All had deep roots in the races dominated by quarterhorse contests which have for generations filled the rural areas of Acadiana. Today these tracks may be in decline (although how seriously is hard to say) but in 1948 they were very much a going concern. Horses then which appeared outside the premiere in 1948 were very much a symbol of the Cajuns and Acadiana. Of course horses have been symbols of many peoples and countries. In fact that is probably why unlike the Russian bear, the English Lion, the American Eagle and so forth they do not stick. They are real and powerful symbols and images and realities for many peoples and so they do not come to be associated with one people. If there is an animal that now must recognizably is associated with Cajuns it is the lowly crawfish. A distant second would be the alligator. But the horse has always been very important and even now continues to be relatively important. The traditional length for a rural race in Acadiana is four arpents (quatres arpents). The arpent is 64 yards. The original yards would have been slightly different from the yards in the American system of measure and on real estate transactions this all led to confusion. However, in the racing world the standard American yard had been completely adopted by 1948. The riding of horses also at the heart of much of traditional identity.

The jockeys that made their livings and rose to some sort of prosperity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were often the most malnourished young boys whose families were perhaps genetically small but also did not have enough to eat. They started off earning enough to get a few meals for themselves and their families and perhaps some would gain enough weight to be disqualified from greatness. The rare combination of malnutrition, genetic smallness and coming to manhood without getting big but while growing in reputation, skill and business savvy laid the foundation for a successful jockey of the era between the 1860s and 1948. But the great rewards of the recent batch of professionals did not exist. Likewise Cajun rodeo cowboys were around and could supplement an income with skills used in ranching and the life of the old vacherie. However, this life was not built on the shadows which haunted the jockey culture but neither were Cajun cowboys extremely successful in the world of rodeo. There were plenty who were somewhat successful and there were a handful who were very successful but there was not kind of institutional dominance which united the Jim Boudreaux, Kenny and Jim Bergeron and Ernest Theriot with others in creating a kind of dynastic tradition atop the sport.

In addition the equivalent of the smallest bush races was more like the informal rodeos after a local cattle drive or roundup. That kind of activity fed and defined the local culture and had a lot to do with shaping local life and values but it did not make as good a basis for a larger connection with society as a whole. It made for a world where the skills of the cowboy were tied to the business of raising beef and breeding horses almost entirely.

The buggies that appeared at the Frank’s were part of a dying breed. 1955 is a year that folklorisitically and generally speaking one could say and people did say (as confirmed by the Buggy Festival materials online) that almost all regular use of buggies as transportation in Cajun towns effectively ended. In 1961 Church Point Louisiana, which preserved a mounted Courire with mounted Mardi Gras riders when changing torts law made it more rare also chartered and organized a Buggy Festival where antique buggies were preserved and paraded. The horse played many roles in Acadiana. Horse breeding accomplishments have been significant. Lynn Richard’s book A History of Cajun Quarter Horse Racing has done a decent job of documenting the achievements of these local breeders, trainers and jockeys and the fans who supported them in achieving national, regional and even international excellence. The stock used for racing bled its way into the farms and ranches of the region. The sense of communal economy was both real and promoted in this culture. Acadiana does not manufacture cars and trucks. All the dealerships, mechanics and roads in the region will not allow it to participate in the car based economy in the way that it could participate in the horse industry.

The new Postwar era of increasingly worldwide oil and petroleum was a set of opportunities that Cajuns wished to participate in as much as they could. However, it was also a period of many risks. The Cajun rancher could control the herd of horses and make their future and current plans adapt to current conditions. Like many other aspects of life the role of the small town and the common man in the coming years seemed likely to be more passive. But Louisiana Story told a true story of trappers given a new security by the newly confident industry. This was set around fictional events but it was the experience of many.

The troubles over lands and navigable marshes, old rights and state laws in the larger swamps would all have new aspects as the oil industry advanced. But those disputes were like the Korean War — one can see the pieces in place but the troubles are not yet in full swing. Coastal erosion and the role of abandoned canals, cuts and the depredations of the nutria which allowed hurricanes to wreak vast damage. These things would be mostly whispers after Audrey would come in a couple of years and Hurricane Rita was far off. The BP oil spill and the discussions which followed were still a long way from center of most people’s thoughts.

The days would come when trappers, coastal ranchers, shrimpers like those pictured above going out to fight the BP spill with specialized gear and others among the Cajuns and their neighbors would have to consider whether the promise of abundance offered in Louisiana Story was a fair promise. There would be times of trouble and many problems would not be resolved. Yet when the film premiered at the Frank’s it offered a happy ending that people could relate to easily enough. People wanted to be optimistic about the role of petroleum in the future and they were.

This next chapter in Emerging views deals with all the photographic projects but focuses on the film made in Abbeville, rural Vermilion and rural Iberia Parishes. It deals with many of the aspects of the work which was being done and how that work tied into Acadiana experience before and after that film, Louisiana Story was made. Here is a link of some use to those who might like to make a movie in Abbeville today.

But the work of sustaining a living community, of building a region and a set of local traditions, of continuing to enhance a regional and ethnic aesthetic — this work continues without ever stopping… It references the past and reaches for the future.

As I was on the way to the place where I am typing this post I took this set of photographs. In many ways a new public clock is a symbol and expression of a community tradition.

Today as I was coming to the Library to drop off some books and scholarly journals as a donation and to dive right in to the public access internet in my current internet deprived state — as i was doing that I saw that at this moment and at no other they were putting up a traditional looking new clock where there has never been one in my memory. That is the way life and the life of a community evolve. New things occur which speak to us of a whole set of previous experiences and of future hopes and aspirations as well as of the current events going on…

franksummers3ba.wordpress.com

This blog has over ninety pages of content at the time I registered the domain myself in 2014 after posting and working here for years, many of these pages are equivalent to many printed pages. I since then have been confronted with a higher level of premium that I have not accepted.

One of my concerns in this blog has been the overall set of issues related to intellectual honesty, transparency and also the need to provide access to sources. I will return to the issue of textual sources below but here I have another set of issues that relate to images to discuss first. The blog also has well over 650 posts, some are many pages long and some are brief. In this blog I reveal myself and my background and ideas and also deal with a variety of topical and current events. Many of the posts have images. Most of those are photographs I took or directed others to take. Some are from defunct source contracts and contacts I acquired. Some are from sources made into new art pieces by me. Starting on November 10, 2014 I have used Microsoft Office as a source of Royalty free clip art as well.

There are various features and functions by WordPress or others to help you figure out what is available here and to find what you would like to read or view. One part of the blog which you may find useful is the "Glossary of Terms Casually Defined" which can be found in the list of pages in the side column or by hovering your cursor over the "Acadian Forum Archive" in the list of words around and in the Header. Once the first glossary page drops down then hover over earlier glossary pages to unlock later ones. along with my blogroll there are many other embedded links in my post and these provide some insight into secondary sources that I have been reading, in addition any picture of me with someone or record of a formal meeting with a person will allow the reader to conjecture some sort of communication. But this is only a small approximation of scholarly notation. Assume that I pay dues when I can to the Catholic Church, every University I have attended and the Wikipedia and consult their online resources. Also assume that I consult the CIA World Factbook. Beyond that hope for the best. This is a publication on the edge by a person on the edge in many ways and does not reflect the careful annotation of a different medium.

There is an activist element in this blog which is extension of activity, prayer, evolution and planning in the rest of my own life and thought. You will find ideas such as Physical Geometry, my model constitutions and some other ideas and words I care about in the "Major Themes of this Blog" section of pages in the Header. So far some things like early chapters of my online novel are only available in posts and you can find these in the search function or the category cloud.

I am Frank Wynerth Summers III, There have been many other outlets for me to communicate with the world in the past but not so much lately. There is a cluster of links in the blogroll which you may find helpful in reaching the connections in which I live and I have a couple of pages of links and links in posts you may find over time. You can find out more about me in pages revealed when you over over my name in the header section or in those same pages as listed in the side column. Feel free to comment, only a very small percentage of people commented in the first four and a half years so I am usually able to respond to those who do in relatively timely fashion. This blog began on August 18, 2009.